Migrating a (large) science database to the cloud
Ani Thakar, Alexander S. Szalay · 2010
We report on attempts to put an existing scientific (astronomical) database -- the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) science archive [1] - in the cloud. Based on our experience, it is either very frustrating or impossible at this time to migrate an existing, complex SQL Server database into current cloud service offerings such as Amazon (EC2) and Microsoft (SQL Azure). Certainly it is impossible to migrate a large database in excess of a TB, but even with (much) smaller databases, the limitations of cloud services make it very difficult to migrate the data to the cloud without making changes to the schema and settings (for example, inability to migrate a spatial indexing library, and several other user-defined functions and stored procedures) that would invalidate performance comparisons between cloud and on-premise versions. So it is not surprising that our preliminary performance comparisons show a very large (an order of magnitude) performance discrepancy with the Amazon cloud version of the SDSS database. We have also not yet investigated the performance tweaks that could be possible within the cloud.