A successful application/product results in increasing database size. Sooner or later, each database runs into performance troubles as it grows; queries are answered slower and measures must be taken to make the database fast again. As database size increases, this task becomes more and more problematic because the hardware the database runs on has a fixed size.

The common solution for this problem is to migrate to new hardware that is faster and bigger. However, new hardware that is twice as fast tends to be more than twice as expensive. Furthermore, the speed of a single database server has a ceiling, so it may be necessary to step up to a parallel database server. Instead of increasing hardware size, decreasing the database size could be an alternative solution. However, implementing data archiving to offline storage (information life-time management) is time consuming for software developers and may not be suitable for medical data. These factors result in a negative economy of scale for successful products that use conventional hardware and database solutions!

MGRID is a highly scalable distributed database management system that excels in both online transaction processing and analytical queries on large data sets. The benefits of using MGRID include:

• High Performance: distributed parallel query delivers high performance in large datasets
• Scalability: horizontal scaling accommodates very large datasets
• High Availability: native redundancy ensures high availability
• Low TCO: commodity hardware and minimal administration keep costs down