Storage Profiles

Storage profiles are GridGain node entities that define a Storage Engine and its configuration parameters. They create a bridge between tables and the underlying storage engines that store data.

A storage profile defines:

Each node in a GridGain cluster can have multiple storage profiles defined, and a table can only have a single storage profile defined.

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. When creating a distribution zone, you specify which storage profiles it can use:

In this case, the tables created in this distribution zone can only use profile1 or profile3.

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:

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.

In some scenarios, it is preferable to have a separate storage for "cold" data, while the primary storage profile handles active users. Data in secondary storage profiles is always stored in columnar format optimized analytics workloads and can only be read. Updates to primary storage are automatically also applied to secondary storage.

You can create a secondary storage profile in a way similar to primary storage profiles:

To define a secondary storage profile in your table, you need to make sure it is part of the distribution zone, and then specify it as a SECONDARY STORAGE PROFILE. This can only be done when the table is created, for example:

You can also mix data from primary and secondary storage in a single query:

You can also specify a separate distribution zone for the secondary storage, in which case secondary storage data will be placed according to the configuration for secondary zone: