Enabling Persistence Using a Real-World Application

Abstract

This chapter turns the theory from Chapter 4 (and other chapters) into practice. We show how an application can take advantage of persistent memory by building a persistent memory-aware database storage engine. We use MariaDB (https:// mariadb.org/), a popular open source database, as it provides a pluggable storage engine model. The completed storage engine is not intended for production use and does not implement all the features a production quality storage engine should. We implement only the basic functionality to demonstrate how to begin persistent memory programming using a well known database. The intent is to provide you with a more hands-on approach for persistent memory programming so you may enable persistent memory features and functionality within your own application. Our storage engine is left as an optional exercise for you to complete. Doing so would create a new persistent memory storage engine for MariaDB, MySQL, Percona Server, and other derivatives. You may also choose to modify an existing MySQL database storage engine to add persistent memory features, or perhaps choose a different database entirely. We assume that you are familiar with the preceding chapters that covered the fundamentals of the persistent memory programming model and Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK). In this chapter, we implement our storage engine using C++ and libpmemobj-cpp from Chapter 8. If you are not a C++ developer, you will still find this information helpful because the fundamentals apply to other languages and applications. The complete source code for the persistent memory-aware database storage engine can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/pmem/pmdk-examples/tree/master/ pmem-mariadb.