Icarus: Towards a multistore database system

The last years have seen a vast diversification on the database market. In contrast to the “one-size-fits-all” paradigm according to which systems have been designed in the past, today's database management systems (DBMS) are tuned for particular workloads. This has led to DBMSs optimized for high performance, high throughput read/write workloads in online transaction processing (OLTP) and systems optimized for complex analytical queries (OLAP). However, this approach reaches a limit when systems have to deal with mixed workloads that are neither pure OLAP nor pure OLTP workloads. In such cases, multistores are increasingly gaining popularity. Rather than supporting one single database paradigm and addressing one particular workload, multistores encompass several DBMSs that store data in different schemas and allow to route requests on a per-query level to the most appropriate system. In this paper, we introduce the multistore ICARUS. In our evaluation based on a workload that combines OLTP and OLAP elements, we show that ICARUS is able to speed-up queries up to a factor of three by properly routing queries to the best underlying DBMS.