Persistent Buffer Management with Optimistic Consistency

Finding the best way to leverage non-volatile memory (NVM) on modern database systems is still an open problem. The answer is far from trivial since the clear boundary between memory and storage present in most systems seems to be incompatible with the intrinsic memory-storage duality of NVM. Rather than treating NVM either solely as memory or solely as storage, in this work we propose how NVM can be simultaneously used as both in the context of modern database systems. We design a persistent buffer pool on NVM, enabling pages to be directly read/written by the CPU (like memory) while recovering corrupted pages after a failure (like storage). The main benefits of our approach are an easy integration in the existing database architectures, reduced costs (by replacing DRAM with NVM), and faster peak-performance recovery

Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems

Two emerging hardware trends will dominate the database system technology in the near future: increasing main memory capacities of several TB per server and massively parallel multi-core processing. Many algorithmic and control techniques in current database technology were devised for disk-based systems where I/O dominated the performance. In this work we take a new look at the well-known sort-merge join which, so far, has not been in the focus of research in scalable massively parallel multi-core data processing as it was deemed inferior to hash joins. We devise a suite of new massively parallel sort-merge (MPSM) join algorithms that are based on partial partition-based sorting. Contrary to classical sort-merge joins, our MPSM algorithms do not rely on a hard to parallelize final merge step to create one complete sort order. Rather they work on the independently created runs in parallel. This way our MPSM algorithms are NUMA-affine as all the sorting is carried out on local memory partitions. An extensive experimental evaluation on a modern 32-core machine with one TB of main memory proves the competitive performance of MPSM on large main memory databases with billions of objects. It scales (almost) linearly in the number of employed cores and clearly outperforms competing hash join proposals - in particular it outperforms the "cutting-edge" Vectorwise parallel query engine by a factor of four.Comment: VLDB201

Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control

Multi-versioned database systems have the potential to significantly increase the amount of concurrency in transaction processing because they can avoid read-write conflicts. Unfortunately, the increase in concurrency usually comes at the cost of transaction serializability. If a database user requests full serializability, modern multi-versioned systems significantly constrain read-write concurrency among conflicting transactions and employ expensive synchronization patterns in their design. In main-memory multi-core settings, these additional constraints are so burdensome that multi-versioned systems are often significantly outperformed by single-version systems. We propose Bohm, a new concurrency control protocol for main-memory multi-versioned database systems. Bohm guarantees serializable execution while ensuring that reads never block writes. In addition, Bohm does not require reads to perform any book-keeping whatsoever, thereby avoiding the overhead of tracking reads via contended writes to shared memory. This leads to excellent scalability and performance in multi-core settings. Bohm has all the above characteristics without performing validation based concurrency control. Instead, it is pessimistic, and is therefore not prone to excessive aborts in the presence of contention. An experimental evaluation shows that Bohm performs well in both high contention and low contention settings, and is able to dramatically outperform state-of-the-art multi-versioned systems despite maintaining the full set of serializability guarantees

Online Bit Flip Detection for In-Memory B-Trees on Unreliable Hardware

Hardware vendors constantly decrease the feature sizes of integrated circuits to obtain better performance and energy efficiency. Due to cosmic rays, low voltage or heat dissipation, hardware -- both processors and memory -- becomes more and more unreliable as the error rate increases. From a database perspective bit flip errors in main memory will become a major challenge for modern in-memory database systems, which keep all their enterprise data in volatile, unreliable main memory. Although existing hardware error control techniques like ECC-DRAM are able to detect and correct memory errors, their detection and correction capabilities are limited. Moreover, hardware error correction faces major drawbacks in terms of acquisition costs, additional memory utilization, and latency. In this paper, we argue that slightly increasing data redundancy at the right places by incorporating context knowledge already increases error detection significantly. We use the B-Tree -- as a widespread index structure -- as an example and propose various techniques for online error detection and thus increase its overall reliability. In our experiments, we found that our techniques can detect more errors in less time on commodity hardware compared to non-resilient B-Trees running in an ECC-DRAM environment. Our techniques can further be easily adapted for other data structures and are a first step in the direction of resilient database systems which can cope with unreliable hardware

Model-Driven Integration of Compression Algorithms in Column-Store Database Systems

Abstract. Modern database systems are very often in the position to store their entire data in main memory. Aside from increased main memory capacities, a further driver for in-memory database systems was the shift to a decomposition storage model in combination with lightweight data compression algorithms. Using both mentioned storage design concepts, large datasets can be held and processed in main memory with a low memory footprint. In recent years, a large corpus of lightweight data compression algorithms has been developed to efficiently support different data characteristics. In this paper, we present our novel model-driven concept to integrate this large and evolving corpus of lightweight data compression algorithms in column-store database systems. Core components of our concept are (i) a unified conceptual model for lightweight compression algorithms, (ii) specifying algorithms as platform-independent model instances, (iii) transforming model instances into low-level system code, and (iv) integrating low-level system code into a storage layer

KISS-Tree: Smart Latch-Free In-Memory Indexing on Modern Architectures

Growing main memory capacities and an increasing number of hardware threads in modern server systems led to fundamental changes in database architectures. Most importantly, query processing is nowadays performed on data that is often completely stored in main memory. Despite of a high main memory scan performance, index structures are still important components, but they have to be designed from scratch to cope with the specific characteristics of main memory and to exploit the high degree of parallelism. Current research mainly focused on adapting block-optimized B+-Trees, but these data structures were designed for secondary memory and involve comprehensive structural maintenance for updates. In this paper, we present the KISS-Tree, a latch-free inmemory index that is optimized for a minimum number of memory accesses and a high number of concurrent updates. More specifically, we aim for the same performance as modern hash-based algorithms but keeping the order-preserving nature of trees. We achieve this by using a prefix tree that incorporates virtual memory management functionality and compression schemes. In our experiments, we evaluate the KISS-Tree on different workloads and hardware platforms and compare the results to existing in-memory indexes. The KISS-Tree offers the highest reported read performance on current architectures, a balanced read/write performance, and has a low memory footprint

Database architecture optimized for the new bottleneck: Memory access

In the past decade, advances in speed of commodity CPUs have far out-paced advances in memory latency. Main-memory access is therefore increasingly a performance bottleneck for many computer applications, including database systems. In this article, we use a simple scan test to show the severe impact of this bottleneck. The insights gained are translated into guidelines for database architecture; in terms of both data structures and algorithms. We discuss how vertically fragmented data structures optimize cache performance on sequential data access. We then focus on equi-join, typically a random-access operation, and introduce radix algorithms for partitioned hash-join. The performance of these algorithms is quantified using a detailed analytical model that incorporates memory access cost. Experiments that validate this model were performed on the Monet database system. We obtained exact statistics on events like TLB misses, L1 and L2 cache misses, by using hardware performance counters found in modern CPUs. Using our cost model, we show how the carefully tuned memory access pattern of our radix algorithms make them perform well, which is confirmed by experimental results

Energy-Aware Data Management on NUMA Architectures

The ever-increasing need for more computing and data processing power demands for a continuous and rapid growth of power-hungry data center capacities all over the world. As a first study in 2008 revealed, energy consumption of such data centers is becoming a critical problem, since their power consumption is about to double every 5 years. However, a recently (2016) released follow-up study points out that this threatening trend was dramatically throttled within the past years, due to the increased energy efficiency actions taken by data center operators. Furthermore, the authors of the study emphasize that making and keeping data centers energy-efficient is a continuous task, because more and more computing power is demanded from the same or an even lower energy budget, and that this threatening energy consumption trend will resume as soon as energy efficiency research efforts and its market adoption are reduced. An important class of applications running in data centers are data management systems, which are a fundamental component of nearly every application stack. While those systems were traditionally designed as disk-based databases that are optimized for keeping disk accesses as low a possible, modern state-of-the-art database systems are main memory-centric and store the entire data pool in the main memory, which replaces the disk as main bottleneck. To scale up such in-memory database systems, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) hardware architectures are employed that face a decreased bandwidth and an increased latency when accessing remote memory compared to the local memory. In this thesis, we investigate energy awareness aspects of large scale-up NUMA systems in the context of in-memory data management systems. To do so, we pick up the idea of a fine-grained data-oriented architecture and improve the concept in a way that it keeps pace with increased absolute performance numbers of a pure in-memory DBMS and scales up on NUMA systems in the large scale. To achieve this goal, we design and build ERIS, the first scale-up in-memory data management system that is designed from scratch to implement a data-oriented architecture. With the help of the ERIS platform, we explore our novel core concept for energy awareness, which is Energy Awareness by Adaptivity. The concept describes that software and especially database systems have to quickly respond to environmental changes (i.e., workload changes) by adapting themselves to enter a state of low energy consumption. We present the hierarchically organized Energy-Control Loop (ECL), which is a reactive control loop and provides two concrete implementations of our Energy Awareness by Adaptivity concept, namely the hardware-centric Resource Adaptivity and the software-centric Storage Adaptivity. Finally, we will give an exhaustive evaluation regarding the scalability of ERIS as well as our adaptivity facilities

Join Algorithms: From External Memory to the BSP

Database systems have been traditionally disk-based, which had motivated the extensive study on external memory (EM) algorithms. However, as RAMs continue to get larger and cheaper, modern distributed data systems are increasingly adopting a main memory based, shared-nothing architecture, exemplified by systems like Spark and Flink. These systems can be abstracted by the BSP model (with variants like the MPC model and the MapReduce model), and there has been a strong revived interest in designing BSP algorithms for handling large amounts of data. With hard disks starting to fade away from the picture, EM algorithms may now seem less relevant. However, we observe that many of the recently developed join algorithms under the BSP model have a high degree of resemblance with their counterparts in the EM model. In this talk, I will present some recent results on join algorithms in the EM and BSP model, examine their relationships, and discuss a general theoretical framework for converting EM algorithms to the BSP