Speakers:

Vikramraj Sitpal , Shubham Kumar

Date:

Thu Jun 18, 2026 @ 12:00pm EDT

Date:

Thu Jun 18, 2026

Time:

12:00pm EDT

Location:

ZoomZoom

Title:

Why We Created Yet Another Memory Framework: Understanding MGA’s Role in Next-Gen Database Systems

System:

Oracle

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Talk Info:

Modern database engines already provide multiple memory areas, but under production constraints they often force a difficult choice: use globally shared memory (such as the SGA), with coarse visibility and lifecycle semantics, or use private process memory (such as the PGA), with stronger isolation but more copying, fragmentation, and indirect coordination when state must be shared selectively. This talk presents Managed Global Area (MGA) in Oracle AI Database as a scoped shared-memory abstraction that fills this missing middle. MGA lets database components define the allocation source, process membership, synchronization policy, lifecycle, and recovery behavior for memory shared across selected processes, without imposing system-wide visibility. We will describe how MGA is built around namespaces, segments, address-space reservation, dynamic attach/detach, fixed variables, recovery records, and observability, and show how these mechanisms make shared memory usable in a production database setting. Through analytical and AI workloads that stress shared-memory execution, our work demonstrates that dynamically scoped shared memory can improve both efficiency and predictability, reducing join-intensive TPC-H latency by up to 35%, model-sharing memory footprint by up to 90%, and large-model inference latency by up to 37%.

Bio:

Vikramraj is a Senior Development Manager at Oracle, focusing on database kernel development within the Database organization. He has had the opportunity to work on various code infrastructure modules, including memory, synchronization, resource management, code sandboxing and I/O. With experience across operating systems, storage systems, networks, distributed systems, and database technologies, he enjoys collaborating with others to solve challenging technical problems and contribute to Oracle’s ongoing innovation. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Systems from Carnegie Mellon University (MSIN ’21)

Shubham Kumar is a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Virtual Operating Systems team at Oracle. His work sits at the intersection of database internals, operating systems, and hardware, with a focus on memory management, memory isolation, and observability in large-scale database systems. He is especially interested in making production memory behavior more predictable, efficient, secure, and easier to diagnose. He has a Bachelor's degree from Indian Institute of Information Technology, Ranchi and a Master's degree from State University of New York, Binghamton.

More Info: https://pdl.cmu.edu/talk-series/2026/061826.shtml