Storage Profiles and Engines

Storage engine is a GridGain node entity responsible for storing data on disk or in volatile memory in a particular format. It defines:

GridGain is developed with the option to support different storage engines that can be used interchangeably, depending on the type of load you expect for your database. Currently, GridGain supports:

Storage profile is the GridGain node entity that defines a Storage Engine and its configuration parameters. A Distribution Zone must be configured to use a set of declared Storage Profiles, which can be used to parameterize tables created in this Zone with different Storage Engines. A table can only have a single storage profile defined.

Storage profiles define:

You can declare any number of storage profiles on a node.

GridGain creates a default storage profile that uses the persistent Apache Ignite storage engine (aipersist) to store data. Unless otherwise specified, distribution zones will use this storage profile to store data. To check the currently available profiles on the node, use the following command:

Storage engine configuration on the node is applied to all storage profiles, and all storage engines start with their respective default configuration. For more information about default configuration of storage engines, see the Storage Configuration section.

To change storage engine configuration, use the CLI tool. You can use the node config show storage.engines command to check the current storage engine configuration. You can change configuration by specifying the new parameters in the node config update command, for example:

After the configuration is updated, make sure to restart the node.

By default, only the default storage profile is created, however a node can have any number of storage profiles on it. To create a new profile, pass the profile configuration to the storage.profiles parameter:

After the configuration is updated, make sure to restart the node. The created storage profile will be available for use by a distribution zone after the restart.

After you have defined your storage profiles and distribution zones, you can create tables in it by using SQL or from code. Both zone and storage profile cannot be changed after the table has been created.

For example, here is how you create a simple table:

In this case, the exampleTable table will be using the storage engine with the parameters specified in the profile1 storage profile. If the node does not have the profile1, the table will not be stored on it. Each node may have different configuration for profile1, and data will be stored according to local configuration.