Extending an open source enterprise service bus for PostgreSQL statement transformation to enable cloud data access

Abstract

Cloud computing has enabled a new era in the IT industry and many organizations are interested in moving their business operations to the Cloud. This can be realized by designing new applications that follow the prerequisites of the Cloud provider or just by migrating the existing applications to the Cloud. Each application follows a multi-layered architecture defined by its design approach. Application data is of utmost importance and it is managed by the data layer, which is further divided into two sublayers, the Data Access Layer (DAL) and the Database Layer (DBL). The former abstracts the data access functionality and the latter ensures data persistence and data manipulation. Application migration to the Cloud can be achieved by migrating all layers it consists of or only part of them. In many situations it is chosen to move only the DBL to the Cloud and keep the other layers on-premise. Most preferably, the migration of the DBL should be transparent to the upper layers of the application, so that the effort and the cost of the migration, especially concerning application refactoring, becomes minimal. In this thesis, an open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), able to provide multi-tenant and transparent data access to the Cloud, is extended with PostgreSQL transformation functionality. Previously the ESB could only support MySQL source databases. After the integration of two new components, a PostgreSQL proxy and a PostgreSQL transformer, we provide support for PostgreSQL source databases and dialects. Furthermore, we validate and evaluate our approach based on the TPC-H benchmark, in order to ensure results based on realistic SQL statements and appropriate example data. We show linear time complexity, O(n) of the developed PostgreSQL transformer.