Improving the Performance and Endurance of Persistent Memory with Loose-Ordering Consistency

Persistent memory provides high-performance data persistence at main memory. Memory writes need to be performed in strict order to satisfy storage consistency requirements and enable correct recovery from system crashes. Unfortunately, adhering to such a strict order significantly degrades system performance and persistent memory endurance. This paper introduces a new mechanism, Loose-Ordering Consistency (LOC), that satisfies the ordering requirements at significantly lower performance and endurance loss. LOC consists of two key techniques. First, Eager Commit eliminates the need to perform a persistent commit record write within a transaction. We do so by ensuring that we can determine the status of all committed transactions during recovery by storing necessary metadata information statically with blocks of data written to memory. Second, Speculative Persistence relaxes the write ordering between transactions by allowing writes to be speculatively written to persistent memory. A speculative write is made visible to software only after its associated transaction commits. To enable this, our mechanism supports the tracking of committed transaction ID and multi-versioning in the CPU cache. Our evaluations show that LOC reduces the average performance overhead of memory persistence from 66.9% to 34.9% and the memory write traffic overhead from 17.1% to 3.4% on a variety of workloads.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed System

Dynamic Physiological Partitioning on a Shared-nothing Database Cluster

Traditional DBMS servers are usually over-provisioned for most of their daily workloads and, because they do not show good-enough energy proportionality, waste a lot of energy while underutilized. A cluster of small (wimpy) servers, where its size can be dynamically adjusted to the current workload, offers better energy characteristics for these workloads. Yet, data migration, necessary to balance utilization among the nodes, is a non-trivial and time-consuming task that may consume the energy saved. For this reason, a sophisticated and easy to adjust partitioning scheme fostering dynamic reorganization is needed. In this paper, we adapt a technique originally created for SMP systems, called physiological partitioning, to distribute data among nodes, that allows to easily repartition data without interrupting transactions. We dynamically partition DB tables based on the nodes' utilization and given energy constraints and compare our approach with physical partitioning and logical partitioning methods. To quantify possible energy saving and its conceivable drawback on query runtimes, we evaluate our implementation on an experimental cluster and compare the results w.r.t. performance and energy consumption. Depending on the workload, we can substantially save energy without sacrificing too much performance

Letter from the Special Issue Editor

Editorial work for DEBULL on a special issue on data management on Storage Class Memory (SCM) technologies

Speedy Transactions in Multicore In-Memory Databases

Silo is a new in-memory database that achieves excellent performance and scalability on modern multicore machines. Silo was designed from the ground up to use system memory and caches efficiently. For instance, it avoids all centralized contention points, including that of centralized transaction ID assignment. Silo's key contribution is a commit protocol based on optimistic concurrency control that provides serializability while avoiding all shared-memory writes for records that were only read. Though this might seem to complicate the enforcement of a serial order, correct logging and recovery is provided by linking periodically-updated epochs with the commit protocol. Silo provides the same guarantees as any serializable database without unnecessary scalability bottlenecks or much additional latency. Silo achieves almost 700,000 transactions per second on a standard TPC-C workload mix on a 32-core machine, as well as near-linear scalability. Considered per core, this is several times higher than previously reported results.Engineering and Applied Science