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Relational databases as containers

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Article from ADMIN 39/2017

By Udo Seidel

If you spend very much of your time pushing containerized services from server to server, you might be asking yourself: Why not databases, as well? We describe the status quo for RDBMS containers.

Software services packaged as containers finally reached the remotest corners of IT about three years ago. Docker [1], rkt [2], LXC [3], and the like see themselves confronted with technologies that – in part – are significantly older than they are themselves, some of them going back 15 or more years. This category includes relational databases [4], their best known representatives being Oracle [5], MySQL [6], MariaDB [7], and PostgreSQL [8].

Entry-Level Relational

Searching the web for the keyword "database" shows various techniques, implementations, approaches, and software variants. In this article, I focus on the Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) and thus ignore a number of other technologies.

Candidates from the NoSQL scene [9], especially distributed storage for key-value pairs, are excluded. The same applies to databases that store their data in memory [10]. Although these younger database representatives are better suited for cooperation with containers, the popularity of relational databases in the market [11] is strong.

Also, specialized container implementations like Shifter [12] or Singularity [13] are not covered in this article, because they play a

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