System Co-Design and Data Management for Flash Devices

Flash devices are emerging as a replacement for disks. How does this evolution impact the design of data management systems? While flash devices have been available for years, this question is still open. In this tutorial, we share two views on the development of data management systems for flash devices. The first view considers that flash devices introduce so much complexity that it is necessary to reconsider the strictly layered approach between storage system, operating system and data management system. The second view considers that data management systems should recognize the complexity of flash devices and leverage the characteristics of different classes of devices for different usage patterns. Throughout the tutorial, we will cover the data management stack: from the fundamentals of flash technology, through storage for database systems and the manipulation of flash-resident data, to query processing.