DB Seminar [Fall 2014]: Joy Arulraj

The advent of non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies will fundamentally change the dichotomy between transitory memory and durable storage in database management systems (DBMSs). These new NVM devices are almost as fast as DRAM but all writes are persistent even after power loss. Existing DBMSs are unable to take full advantage of this new technology because their internal architectures are predicated on the assumption that memory is volatile. With NVM, such legacy DBMS components are unnecessary and will degrade performance of data intensive applications.

In this talk, I will discuss our work in developing new high-performance DBMSs that are able to take advantage of NVM’s unique properties. I will begin by discussing the development of different storage and recovery methods for OLTP workloads. Our NVM-optimized methods make use of the byte-addressable persistent memory to provide up to 11x higher throughput compared to their traditional counterparts, while also reducing the number of writes to the device by a factor of 4x. These methods are also able to restore the database to a correct state nearly instantaneously after a crash. I will then discuss the early development of N-Store, a new hybrid DBMS designed specifically for NVM.