HOSTING MULTIPLE LOGICAL DATABASES CONTAINED IN PHYSICAL DATABASE

• US 20110179008A1
• Filed: 01/19/2010
• Published: 07/21/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 01/19/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Talius, Tomas
• Granted Patent: US 8,364,722 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/708
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/217 Database tuning G06F16/2282 takes precedence; database performance monitoring G06F11/3409

Abstract

Architecture that defines a logical database that shares physical resources with a containing physical database. The architecture isolates the relational engine system metadata parts of a database in horizontal scopes to form separate namespaces, and shares the underlying storage engine system metadata. Sharing physical database resources enables efficient input/output (I/O) utilization and instantaneous database creation and growth. In addition, logical databases can be backed up as a single transactionally consistent unit.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented database management system having a tangible component, comprising:

a scoping component that creates scopes of logical database units from relational engine metadata; and

a mapping component that maps the logical database units to storage engine metadata for sharing of the storage engine metadata among the logical database units.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the logical database units include tables that are mapped to data structure information of the storage engine metadata.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the logical database units are isolated in horizontal scopes that form isolated respective namespaces.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the mapping component facilitates access to stored data structures of the storage engine metadata.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the logical database units are defined as tables having rows associated with an identifier.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the logical database units are created automatically and are mapped many-to-one to the storage engine metadata.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein the storage engine metadata includes data structure information, allocation unit information, and file information for recovery to which a logical database unit is mapped.

8. The system of claim 1, further comprising a backup component that backs up a logical database unit as a single transactionally consistent unit.

9. A computer-implemented database management system having a tangible component, comprising:

a scoping component that automatically creates logical database scopes from relational engine metadata; and

a mapping component that maps the logical database partitions to physical database resources for sharing of the physical database resources among the logical database scopes.

10. The system of claim 9, wherein the logical database scopes include tables, which the mapping component maps to a data structure of the physical database resources.

11. The system of claim 9, wherein each of the logical database scopes is formed into an isolated scope.

12. The system of claim 9, wherein the logical database scopes are created dynamically.

13. The system of claim 9, wherein the physical resources are storage engine metadata that includes data structure information, allocation unit information, and file information.

14. The system of claim 9, further comprising a backup component that backs up each of the logical database scopes as a single transactionally consistent unit.

15. A computer-implemented database management method, comprising:

automatically creating logical database scopes from relational engine metadata;

mapping the logical database scopes to physical database resources; and

sharing the physical database resources among the logical database scopes.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising mapping tables of the relational engine metadata to data structures of the physical database resources.

17. The method of claim 15, further comprising providing a scope parameter to a metadata interface and metadata views.

18. The method of claim 15, further comprising performing the creating, mapping, and sharing in a structured query language server.

19. The method of claim 15, further comprising horizontally creating the logical database scopes by prefixing relational tables with a scope identifier as a leading key.

20. The method of claim 15, further comprising backing up each of the logical database scopes as a single transactionally consistent unit.