Open Access

Flash SSDs are omnipresent as database storage. HDD replacement is seamless since Flash SSDs implement the same legacy hardware and software interfaces to enable backward compatibility. Yet, the price paid is high as backward compatibility masks the native behaviour, incurs significant complexity and decreases I/O performance, making it non-robust and unpredictable. Flash SSDs are black-boxes. Although DBMS have ample mechanisms to control hardware directly and utilize the performance potential of Flash memory, the legacy interfaces and black-box architecture of Flash devices prevent them from doing so. In this paper we demonstrate NoFTL, an approach that enables native Flash access and integrates parts of the Flashmanagement functionality into the DBMS yielding significant performance increase and simplification of the I/O stack. NoFTL is implemented on real hardware based on the OpenSSD research platform. The contributions of this paper include: (i) a description of the NoFTL native Flash storage architecture; (ii) its integration in Shore-MT and (iii) performance evaluation of NoFTL on a real Flash SSD and on an on-line data-driven Flash emulator under TPCB, C,E and H workloads. The performance evaluation results indicate an improvement of at least 2.4x on real hardware over conventional Flash storage; as well as better utilisation of native Flash parallelism.

A transaction is a demarcated sequence of application operations, for which the following properties are guaranteed by the underlying transaction processing system (TPS): atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID). Transactions are therefore a general abstraction, provided by TPS that simplifies application development by relieving transactional applications from the burden of concurrency and failure handling. Apart from the ACID properties, a TPS must guarantee high and robust performance (high transactional throughput and low response times), high reliability (no data loss, ability to recover last consistent state, fault tolerance), and high availability (infrequent outages, short recovery times). The architectures and workhorse algorithms of a high-performance TPS are built around the properties of the underlying hardware. The introduction of nonvolatile memories (NVM) as novel storage technology opens an entire new problem space, with the need to revise aspects such as the virtual memory hierarchy, storage management and data placement, access paths, and indexing. NVM are also referred to as storage-class memory (SCM).

In this paper we present our work in progress on revisiting traditional DBMS mechanisms to manage space on native Flash and how it is administered by the DBA. Our observations and initial results show that: the standard logical database structures can be used for physical organization of data on native Flash; at the same time higher DBMS performance is achieved without incurring extra DBA overhead. Initial experimental evaluation indicates a 20% increase in transactional throughput under TPC-C, by performing intelligent data placement on Flash, less erase operations and thus better Flash longevity.

In the present tutorial we perform a cross-cut analysis of database storage management from the perspective of modern storage technologies. We argue that neither the design of modern DBMS, nor the architecture of modern storage technologies are aligned with each other. Moreover, the majority of the systems rely on a complex multi-layer and compatibility oriented storage stack. The result is needlessly suboptimal DBMS performance, inefficient utilization, or significant write amplification due to outdated abstractions and interfaces. In the present tutorial we focus on the concept of native storage, which is storage operated without intermediate abstraction layers over an open native storage interface and is directly controlled by the DBMS.

Asymmetric read/write storage technologies such as Flash are becoming a dominant trend in modern database systems. They introduce hardware characteristics and properties which are fundamentally different from those of traditional storage technologies such as HDDs. Multi-Versioning Database Management Systems (MV-DBMSs) and Log-based Storage Managers (LbSMs) are concepts that can effectively address the properties of these storage technologies but are designed for the characteristics of legacy hardware. A critical component of MV-DBMSs is the invalidation model: commonly, transactional timestamps are assigned to the old and the new version, resulting in two independent (physical) update operations. Those entail multiple random writes as well as in-place updates, sub-optimal for new storage technologies both in terms of performance and endurance. Traditional page-append LbSM approaches alleviate random writes and immediate in-place updates, hence reducing the negative impact of Flash read/write asymmetry. Nevertheless, they entail significant mapping overhead, leading to write amplification. In this work we present an approach called Snapshot Isolation Append Storage Chains (SIAS-Chains) that employs a combination of multi-versioning, append storage management in tuple granularity and novel singly-linked (chain-like) version organization. SIAS-Chains features: simplified buffer management, multi-version indexing and introduces read/write optimizations to data placement on modern storage media. SIAS-Chains algorithmically avoids small in-place updates, caused by in-place invalidation and converts them into appends. Every modification operation is executed as an append and recently inserted tuple versions are co-located.