Querying the Internet with PIER Ryan Huebsch, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Nick Lanham, Boon Thau Loo, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Distributed Data & Streams (Session A9) Abstract The database research community prides itself on scalable technologies. Yet database systems tradi- tionally do not excel on one important scalability di- mension: the degree of distribution. This limitation has hampered the impact of database technologies on massively distributed systems like the Internet. In this paper, we present the initial design of PIER, a massively distributed query engine based on overlay networks, which is intended to bring database query processing facilities to new, widely distributed envi- ronments. We motivate the need for massively dis- tributed queries, and argue for a relaxation of cer- tain traditional database research goals in the pur- suit of scalability and widespread adoption. We present simulation results showing PIER gracefully running relational queries across thousands of ma- chines, and show results from the same software base in actual deployment on a large experimental cluster. ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery