SQLFire – setup a cluster of multiple servers

SQLFire is a memory-optimized, distributed database management system designed for applications that have demanding scalability and availability requirements. SQLFire offers some of the best features usually only seen in NoSQL databases, such as horizontal scalability, shared-nothing persistence and built in fault tolerance, but does it all while providing a real SQL interface. Applications can manage database tables entirely in memory, or they can persist tables to disk to reload the data after restarting the system. A SQLFire distributed system can be easily scaled out using commodity hardware.

In this post we’ll see how to setup and start a cluster of multiple SQLFire servers.

A SQLFire deployment consists of distributed member processes that connect to each other to form a peer-to-peer network, also known as a distributed system or SQLFire cluster. A server is a process that hosts data and is a member of a peer-to-peer distributed system.  

The connection management to the available servers is done using a locator. A locator maintains a list of available servers in the cluster, and updates that list as servers join and leave the cluster. Locators also load balance client connections across all available servers.

To create a locator you can use the sqlf locator command as given below.

sqlf locator start -dir=MyServerLocator -peer-discovery-address=localhost -peer-discovery-port=10101 -client-bind-address=localhost -client-port=1527

Where MyServerLocator is the folder created at the executing directory for the locator.

By starting the locator member first, the locator can manage cluster membership from the start as new servers join and leave the distributed system.

Use the sqlf server start command to start the servers and join them to the distributed system by specifying the locator as given below.

sqlf server start -dir=MyServer1 -locators=localhost[10101] -bind-address=localhost -client-port=1528

sqlf server start -dir=MyServer2 -locators=localhost[10101] -bind-address=localhost -client-port=1529

To connect to the SQLFire cluster using the JDBC thin client driver, use the connect client command and specify the host and port number of the SQLFire locator as

connect client 'localhost:1527';