HiEngine: How to Architect a Cloud-Native Memory-Optimized Database Engine

Abstract

Fast database engines have become an essential building block in many systems and applications. Yet most of them are designed based on on-premise solutions and do not directly work in the cloud. Existing cloud-native database systems are mostly disk resident databases that follow a storage-centric design and exploit the potential of modern cloud infrastructure, such as manycore processors, large main memory and persistent memory. However, in-memory databases are infrequent and untapped. This paper presents HiEngine, Huawei's cloud-native memory-optimized in-memory database engine that endows hierarchical database architecture and fills this gap. HiEngine simultaneously (1) leverages the cloud infrastructure with reliable storage services on the compute-side (in addition to the storage tier) for fast persistence and reliability, (2) achieves main-memory database engines' high performance, and (3) retains backward compatibility with existing cloud-native database systems. HiEngine is integrated with Huawei GaussDB(for MySQL), it brings the benefits of main-memory database engines to the cloud and co-exists with disk-based engines. Compared to conventional systems, HiEngine outperforms prior storage-centric solutions by up to 7.5X and provides comparable performance to on-premise memory-optimized database engines.