A Performance Study of Non-In-Place Update Based Transaction Processing on NAND Flash SSD

Abstract NAND flash memory is one of the most aggressively scaled technologies among electronic devices recently. The massive increase in the capacity makes flash memory possible for enterprise applications, such as the database system. However, the characteristic of erase-before-write makes flash memory very challenging for the database management. A non-in-place update technique may be exploited to overcome the erase-before-write problem. In this paper, we provide a careful performance study of utilizing the non-in-place update technique for transactional database applications running on the flash memory. We deliberately design the experiment of the enterprise database system on flash memory, with a careful study on the performance gain, and reveals some insights into the enterprise applications built on the flash memory. In particular, we carefully tune the system to gain the superiority to the existing ones. We describe experiments in detail showing the benefits of utilizing non-in-place update on flash memory.