Read:

• David Dewitt and Jim Gray. Parallel Database Systems: The Future of High Performance Database Processing. Communications of the ACM. 1992. Red Book.

The Dewitt and Gray paper is a high level summary of database architectures for parallelism, illustrating some of the techniques that can be used to exploit the availability of multiple processors in a database system.

Questions to consider:

1. What's the difference between a parallel and a distributed database? What issues are different in one architecture versus the other? In what ways are the two architectures alike?
2. Why do Dewitt and Gray advocate a shared nothing architecture?
3. In what ways must existing database architectures be modified to support multi-processor environments? What new data layout issues are introduced? What new query processing challenges must be addressed?