Improving Database Storage Usability with the Cloud-Based Architecture

Database is widely used for information storage and management. With the explosion of the data size, the requirement of the storage capacity is growing dramatically. Cloud offers clients a scalable solution to meet the demand of the increasing space. A cloud service, if used and managed properly, can increase the resource usability and provide more secure services. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based database architecture that increases the database storage usability meanwhile ensuring the data security. In this architecture, we move the database storage into a shared cloud-based server and leave the database engine at user’s domain. The transmission of database physical files between the cloud and the database engine is achieved through Network File System. To avoid information leakage incurred by attacks on the cloud, the physical files stored in the cloud were encrypted by the database engine. To verify our idea, we used MySQL as our study case and evaluated the performance of this new architecture. A series of experiments indicate that the proposed architecture is promising in improving storage sharing, meanwhile guaranteeing the data security.