2011: No bits left behind

This is a fun vision paper I wrote with Eugene Wu and Sam Madden, on how we should be more careful about leaving no bits behind (in the memory hierarchy), and suggest few ideas/improvements we can make to DBMSs today.

 

 

ABSTRACT

One of the key tenets of database system design is making efficient use of storage and memory resources. However, existing database system implementations are actually extremely wasteful of such resources; for example, most systems leave a great deal of empty space in tuples, index pages, and data pages, and spend many CPU cycles reading cold records from disk that are never used. In this paper, we identify a number of such sources of waste, and present a series of techniques that limit this waste (e.g., forcing better memory locality for hot data and using empty space in index pages to cache popular tuples) without substantially complicating interfaces or system design. We show that these techniques effectively reduce memory requirements for real scenarios from the Wikipedia database (by up to 17.8×) while increasing query performance (by up to 8×).

You can find the paper here: http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper23.pdf

@inproceedings{wu2011nobits,   author    = {Eugene Wu and                Carlo Curino and                Samuel Madden},   title     = {No bits left behind},   booktitle = {CIDR},   year      = {2011},   pages     = {187-190},   ee        = {http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper23.pdf}, }