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Flash as cache extension for online transactional workloads

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Abstract

Considering the current price gap between hard disk and flash memory SSD storages, for applications dealing with large-scale data, it will be economically more sensible to use flash memory drives to supplement disk drives rather than to replace them. This paper presents FaCE, which is a new low-overhead caching strategy that uses flash memory as an extension to the RAM buffer of database systems. FaCE aims at improving the transaction throughput as well as shortening the recovery time from a system failure. To achieve the goals, we propose two novel algorithms for flash cache management, namely multi-version FIFO replacement and group second chance. This was possible due to flash write optimization as well as disk access reduction obtained by the FaCE caching methods. In addition, FaCE takes advantage of the nonvolatility of flash memory to fully support database recovery by extending the scope of a persistent database to include the data pages stored in the flash cache. We have implemented FaCE in the PostgreSQL open-source database server and demonstrated its effectiveness for TPC-C benchmarks in comparison with existing caching methods such as Lazy Cleaning and Linux Bcache.

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Notes

  1. The write-around policy and its variants are suggested for streaming and OLAP workloads to avoid polluting the cache [2]. We do not discuss them further in this paper, because our focus is on OLTP workloads.

  2. Each segment contains 64,000 meta-data entries of 32 bytes each. Among the 40 segments required for a 10 GB flash cache, 38 of them are fetched directly from flash memory and the rest are rebuilt when the checksum of the data page and stored checksum in the meta-data directory are the same.

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Acknowledgments

Sang-Won Lee and Bongki Moon are the corresponding authors of this paper. This research was supported in part by Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion (IITP) (R0126-15-1088) and the IT R&D program of MKE/KEIT [10041244, SmartTV 2.0 Software Platform]. This work was also partly supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant (No. 2015R1A5A7037372) funded by the Korean Government (MSIP).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 440-746, Korea

    Woon-Hak Kang & Sang-Won Lee

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, 151-744, Korea

    Bongki Moon

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  1. Woon-Hak Kang
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  2. Sang-Won Lee
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Correspondence to Sang-Won Lee.

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Kang, WH., Lee, SW. & Moon, B. Flash as cache extension for online transactional workloads. The VLDB Journal 25, 673–694 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-015-0414-1

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