Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications

17.2. Parallel Databases

In parallel database systems, multiple CPUs work in parallel to improve performance through parallel implementation of various operations such as loading data, building indexes and evaluating queries. Parallel processing divides a large task into many smaller tasks and executes the smaller tasks concurrently on several nodes (CPUs). As a result, the larger tasks completes more quickly. Parallel database systems improve processing and input/output (I/O) speeds by using multiple CPUs and disks working in parallel. Parallel databases are especially useful for applications that have to query large databases and process large number of transactions per second. In parallel processing, many operations are performed simultaneously, ...