Comparing two-phase locking and optimistic concurrency control protocols in multiprocessor real-time databases

Previous studies (Haritsa et al., 1990) have shown that optimistic concurrency control (OCC) generally performs better than lock-based protocols in disk-based real-time database systems (RTDBS). We compare the two concurrency control protocols in both disk-based and memory-resident multiprocessor RTDBS. Based on their performance characteristics, a new lock-based protocol, called two phase locking-lock write all (2PL-LW), is proposed. The results of our performance evaluation experiments show that different characteristics of the two environments indeed have great impact on the protocols' performance. We identify such system characteristics and show that our new lock-based protocols, 2PL-LW, is better than OCC in meeting transaction deadlines in both disk-based and memory-resident RTDBS.published_or_final_versio

Instant restore after a media failure

Media failures usually leave database systems unavailable for several hours until recovery is complete, especially in applications with large devices and high transaction volume. Previous work introduced a technique called single-pass restore, which increases restore bandwidth and thus substantially decreases time to repair. Instant restore goes further as it permits read/write access to any data on a device undergoing restore--even data not yet restored--by restoring individual data segments on demand. Thus, the restore process is guided primarily by the needs of applications, and the observed mean time to repair is effectively reduced from several hours to a few seconds. This paper presents an implementation and evaluation of instant restore. The technique is incrementally implemented on a system starting with the traditional ARIES design for logging and recovery. Experiments show that the transaction latency perceived after a media failure can be cut down to less than a second and that the overhead imposed by the technique on normal processing is minimal. The net effect is that a few "nines" of availability are added to the system using simple and low-overhead software techniques

The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign

Next generation high-performance RDMA-capable networks will require a fundamental rethinking of the design and architecture of modern distributed DBMSs. These systems are commonly designed and optimized under the assumption that the network is the bottleneck: the network is slow and "thin", and thus needs to be avoided as much as possible. Yet this assumption no longer holds true. With InfiniBand FDR 4x, the bandwidth available to transfer data across network is in the same ballpark as the bandwidth of one memory channel, and it increases even further with the most recent EDR standard. Moreover, with the increasing advances of RDMA, the latency improves similarly fast. In this paper, we first argue that the "old" distributed database design is not capable of taking full advantage of the network. Second, we propose architectural redesigns for OLTP, OLAP and advanced analytical frameworks to take better advantage of the improved bandwidth, latency and RDMA capabilities. Finally, for each of the workload categories, we show that remarkable performance improvements can be achieved

Analysis of parallel scan processing in Shared Disk database systems

Shared Disk database systems offer a high flexibility for parallel transaction and query processing. This is because each node can process any transaction, query or subquery because it has access to the entire database. Compared to Shared Nothing database systems, this is particularly advantageous for scan queries for which the degree of intra-query parallelism as well as the scan processors themselves can dynamically be chosen. On the other hand, there is the danger of disk contention between subqueries, in particular for index scans. We present a detailed simulation study to analyze the effectiveness of parallel scan processing in Shared Disk database systems. In particular, we investigate the relationship between the degree of declustering and the degree of scan parallelism for relation scans, clustered index scans, and non-clustered index scans. Furthermore, we study the usefulness of disk caches and prefetching for limiting disk contention. Finally, we show that disk contention in multi-user mode can be limited for Shared Disk database systems by dynamically choosing the degree of scan parallelism

Forecasting the cost of processing multi-join queries via hashing for main-memory databases (Extended version)

Database management systems (DBMSs) carefully optimize complex multi-join queries to avoid expensive disk I/O. As servers today feature tens or hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, a significant fraction of many analytic databases becomes memory-resident. Even after careful tuning for an in-memory environment, a linear disk I/O model such as the one implemented in PostgreSQL may make query response time predictions that are up to 2X slower than the optimal multi-join query plan over memory-resident data. This paper introduces a memory I/O cost model to identify good evaluation strategies for complex query plans with multiple hash-based equi-joins over memory-resident data. The proposed cost model is carefully validated for accuracy using three different systems, including an Amazon EC2 instance, to control for hardware-specific differences. Prior work in parallel query evaluation has advocated right-deep and bushy trees for multi-join queries due to their greater parallelization and pipelining potential. A surprising finding is that the conventional wisdom from shared-nothing disk-based systems does not directly apply to the modern shared-everything memory hierarchy. As corroborated by our model, the performance gap between the optimal left-deep and right-deep query plan can grow to about 10X as the number of joins in the query increases.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, extended version of the paper to appear in SoCC'1

Tupleware: Redefining Modern Analytics

There is a fundamental discrepancy between the targeted and actual users of current analytics frameworks. Most systems are designed for the data and infrastructure of the Googles and Facebooks of the world---petabytes of data distributed across large cloud deployments consisting of thousands of cheap commodity machines. Yet, the vast majority of users operate clusters ranging from a few to a few dozen nodes, analyze relatively small datasets of up to a few terabytes, and perform primarily compute-intensive operations. Targeting these users fundamentally changes the way we should build analytics systems. This paper describes the design of Tupleware, a new system specifically aimed at the challenges faced by the typical user. Tupleware's architecture brings together ideas from the database, compiler, and programming languages communities to create a powerful end-to-end solution for data analysis. We propose novel techniques that consider the data, computations, and hardware together to achieve maximum performance on a case-by-case basis. Our experimental evaluation quantifies the impact of our novel techniques and shows orders of magnitude performance improvement over alternative systems

Controlling Disk Contention for Parallel Query Processing in Shared Disk Database Systems

Shared Disk database systems offer a high flexibility for parallel transaction and query processing. This is because each node can process any transaction, query or subquery because it has access to the entire database. Compared to Shared Nothing, this is particularly advantageous for scan queries for which the degree of intra-query parallelism as well as the scan processors themselves can dynamically be chosen. On the other hand, there is the danger of disk contention between subqueries, in particular for index scans. We present a detailed simulation study to analyze the effectiveness of parallel scan processing in Shared Disk database systems. In particular, we investigate the relationship between the degree of declustering and the degree of scan parallelism for relation scans, clustered index scans, and non-clustered index scans. Furthermore, we study the usefulness of disk caches and prefetching for limiting disk contention. Finally, we show the importance of dynamically choosing the degree of scan parallelism to control disk contention in multi-user mode