The architecture of modern database systems

The paper presents major trends in the modern architecture of large database systems. Two types of architecture are described in detail: the parallel architecture and the distributed architecture. It has been widely recognised that centralised, single processor computing systems and centralised database systems in particular are approaching their theoretical limits of performance. Hence we can observe a growing interest among researchers and developers in the design and implementation of highly efficient distributed architecture. The paper focuses on different types of client-server architecture, which nowadays is becoming very popular in data processing systems.