How to build a non-volatile memory database management system

Abstract

The difference in the performance characteristics of volatile (DRAM) and non-volatile storage devices (HDD/SSDs) influences the design of database management systems (DBMSs). The key assumption has always been that the latter is much slower than the former. This affects all aspects of a DBMS's runtime architecture. But the arrival of new non-volatile memory (NVM) storage that is almost as fast as DRAM with fine-grained read/writes invalidates these previous design choices. In this tutorial, we provide an outline on how to build a new DBMS given the changes to hardware landscape due to NVM. We survey recent developments in this area, and discuss the lessons learned from prior research on designing NVM database systems. We highlight a set of open research problems, and present ideas for solving some of them.