Managing Non-Volatile Memory in Database Systems

Non-volatile memory (NVM) is a new storage technology that combines the performance and byte addressability of DRAM with the persistence of traditional storage devices like flash (SSD). While these properties make NVM highly promising, it is not yet clear how to best integrate NVM into the storage layer of modern database systems. Two system designs have been proposed. The first is to use NVM exclusively, i.e., to store all data and index structures on it. However, because NVM has a higher latency than DRAM, this design can be less efficient than main-memory database systems. For this reason, the second approach uses a page-based DRAM cache in front of NVM. This approach, however, does not utilize the byte addressability of NVM and, as a result, accessing an uncached tuple on NVM requires retrieving an entire page.

In this work, we evaluate these two approaches and compare them with in-memory databases as well as more traditional buffer managers that use main memory as a cache in front of SSDs. This allows us to determine how much performance gain can be expected from NVM. We also propose a lightweight storage manager that simultaneously supports DRAM, NVM, and flash. Our design utilizes the byte addressability of NVM and uses it as an additional caching layer that improves performance without losing the benefits from the even faster DRAM and the large capacities of SSDs.