IPL-P: In-Page Logging with PCRAM

A great deal of research has been done on solid-state storage media such as flash memory and non-volatile memory in the past few years. While NAND-type flash memory is now considered a top alternative to magnetic disk drives, different types of non-volatile memory have also begun to appear in the market recently. Although some advocates of storage class memory (SCM) predicted that flash memory would give way to SCM in the very near future, we believe that they will co-exist, complementing each other, for a while until the hurdles in its manufacturing process are lifted and storage class memory becomes commercially competitive in both capacity and price. This demo presents an improved design of In-Page Logging (IPL) by augmenting it with Phase Change RAM (PCRAM) in its log area. IPL is a buffer and storage management strategy that has been proposed for flash memory database systems. Due to the byte-addressability of PCRAM and its faster speed for small reads and writes, the IPL scheme with PCRAM can improve the performance of flash memory database systems even further by storing frequent log records in PCRAM instead of flash memory. We report a few advantages of this new design that will make IPL more suitable for flash memory database systems.