Optimize write performance for DBMS on Solid State Drive

Solid State Drive (SSD) is believed to be the replacement for magnetic disk in computer systems. SSD is a complex storage device composed of flash chips, controller hardware, and proprietary software that together provide a block device interface via a standard interconnect. Comparing to its fast sequential read/write and random read operations, the random write on SSD is generally believed to be poor. DBMS applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP) will suffer from it because of issuing random write stream to the storage. It is desirable to improve random write performance for these DBMS applications on SSD. Being different from previous solution in literature, we propose a solution which does not rely on modifying the firmware or hardware of SSD, but tries to decomposite the write streams of good write patterns from the archived write requests in a temporary focused area called StableBuffer. It is implemented as a software model called StableBuffer manager extending DBMS buffer manager. We discuss the motivation, design and implementation of StableBuffer manager, and report preliminary evaluation results.