Re-think Data Management Software Design Upon the Arrival of Storage Hardware with Built-in Transparent Compression

This position paper advocates that storage hardware with built-in transparent compression brings promising but largely unexplored opportunities to innovate data storage management software (e.g., database and filesystem). Modern storage appliances (e.g., all-flash array) and some latest SSDs (solid-state drives) can perform data compression transparently from OS and user applications. Such storage hardware decouples logical storage space utilization efficiency from true physical storage space utilization efficiency. This allows data storage management software intentionally waste logical storage space in return for employing simpler data structures, leading to lower implementation complexity and higher performance. Following this theme, we carried out three preliminary case studies in the context of relational database and key-value (KV) store. Initial experimental results well demonstrate the promising potential, and it is our hope that this preliminary study will attract more interest and activities towards exploring this new research area.