Thrifty: Offering Parallel Database as a Service using the Shared-Process Approach

Recently, Amazon has announced Redshift, a Parallel-Database-as-a Service (PDaaS). Redshift adopts the "virtual cluster" approach to implement multitenancy, which has the merit of hard isolation among tenants (i.e., tenants do not interfere even when sharing resources). However, that benefit comes with poor resource utilization due to the significant redundancy incurred in the resources. In this demonstration, we present Thrifty, a Parallel-Database-as-a-Service operated using the "shared-process" approach. Compared with Redshift, each tenant in Thrifty does not occupy an exclusive amount of resource but share the database processes together, leading to better resource utilization. To avoid contention among tenants, Thrifty uses a proper cluster design, a tenant placement scheme, and a query routing mechanism to achieve soft isolation. In the demonstration, an attendee will be invited to register with Thrifty as a tenant to rent a parallel database instance. Then the attendee will be allowed to view the dashboard of a Thrifty's administrator. Next, the attendee will be invited to control (e.g., increase) the workload of the tenant so as to see how Thrifty carries out online re- consolidation and elastic scaling.