BaSE(Byte addressable Storage Engine) Transaction Manager

Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) is an emerging memory technology that combines the best properties of current hard disks and main memories by providing non-volatility, high density, high speed, and byte addressability. This provides an opportunity to redesign systems and their software stacks to improve performance and to reduce the complexity. Present-day database systems are designed and optimized for traditional disks and memory hierarchies. They are very complex because they handle varying levels of storage latencies, from CPU caches to hard disks. Our intention is to build a prototype storage engine that is optimized for NVM and which takes advantage of the collapsed memory hierarchy. We are developing this storage engine in an incremental way. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to optimize write-ahead logging (WAL) for NVM based systems. Most database systems use ARIES-style write-ahead logging to implement transactions. ARIES techniques are optimized for disk based systems and tuned for the sequential write performance of disks. We leverage the high speed, byte-addressable random access of NVM to design a high-performance logging mechanism. We discuss the bottlenecks of sequential logging, identify the challenges of distributed logging and propose a novel solution. We show that NVM-optimized logging improves performance 8-15 times over default MariaDB/XtraDB for log-intensive workloads.