Adding Support for New Hardware in Database Systems

Speaker:	Dr. Stratis D. VIGLAS
		School of Informatics
		University of Edinburgh

Title:		"Adding Support for New Hardware in
		 Database Systems"

Date:		Monday, 1 September 2008

Time:		11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:		Room 3315 (via lifts 17/18), HKUST

Abstract:

Database systems developers have always had to adjust their
implementations to the changing hardware environment.  After a long period
of relative stability, both in terms of storage and also in terms of
processor design, the environment has radically changed.  In terms of
storage, solid state drives are rapidly becoming standard storage
solutions, while the current multi-core processor design effectively
dictates a shared memory design for high-performing applications.   In
this talk, I will (a) focus on our work on making better use of solid
state drives in database applications and (b) briefly present some of our
ongoing work on making better use of current processor designs.

As far as solid state drives go, we target hybrid systems that contain
both solid state and magnetic disk drives.  We propose that instead of
treating the solid state drive as a cache for the magnetic disk, we put
them both at the same level of the memory hierarchy.  Then, we take
advantage of the asymmetric properties of the solid state drive's read and
write speeds and using a workload-driven approach we decide on the optimal
placement of each database page: pages with a read-intensive workload are
placed on the solid state drive, while pages with a write-intensive
workload are placed on the magnetic disk drive.  Our theoretical results
and our experimental evaluation prove this to be the optimal usage in such
hybrid systems.

In terms of supporting new processor architectures, we argue that the
bottleneck is in fact the complexity of the database engine in terms of
its use of the iterator model.  We propose that instead of composing
operators for a given database query, one is better off generating custom,
query-specific, and processor-friendly code and then compiling and
executing it.  Our results in this area show that such an approach
dominates both the iterator-based design, and other hardware-friendly
designs.


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Biography:

Dr Stratis D. VIGLAS is a Lecturer in Database Systems at the School of
Informatics of the University of Edinburgh.  He received his BSc and MSc
degrees in Computer Science from the University of Athens, Greece, and his
PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in
2003.  His main interest is query processing and optimization and in the
past years the bulk of his work has been on data stream processing and
XML.  His current research interests are in the areas of enhancing the
performance of database systems in contemporary hardware setups, and
peer-to-peer database systems.