This book provides basic knowledge about main memory management in relational databases as it is needed to support large-scale applications processed completely in memory. In business operations, real-time predictability and high speed is a must. Hence every opportunity must be exploited to improve performance, including reducing dependency on the hard disk, adding more memory to make more data resident in the memory, and even deploying an in-memory system where all data can be kept in memory. The book provides one chapter for each of the main related topics, i.e. the memory system, memory management, virtual memory, and databases and their memory systems, and it is complemented by a short survey of six commercial systems: TimesTen, MySQL, VoltDB, Hekaton, HyPer/ScyPer, and SAP HANA.

With growing memory sizes and memory prices dropping by a factor of 10 every 5 years, data having a "primary home" in memory is now a reality. Main-memory databases eschew many of the traditional architectural pillars of relational database systems that optimized for disk-resident data. The result of these memory-optimized designs are systems that feature several innovative approaches to fundamental issues (e.g., concurrency control, query processing) that achieve orders of magnitude performance improvements over traditional designs. This monograph provides an overview of recent developments in main-memory database systems. It covers five main issues and architectural choices that need to be made when building a high performance main-memory optimized database: data organization and storage, indexing, concurrency control, durability and recovery techniques, and query processing and compilation. The monograph focuses on four commercial and research systems: H-Store/VoltDB, Hekaton, HyPer, and SAPHANA. These systems are diverse in their design choices and form a representative sample of the state of the art in main-memory database systems. It also covers other commercial and academic systems, along with current and future research trends.

With the availability of very large, relatively inexpensive main memories, it is becoming possible to keep large databases resident in main memory. This paper considers the changes necessary to permit a relational database system to take advantage of large amounts of main memory. The authors evaluate AVL vs. B+- tree access methods for main memory databases, hash-based query processing strategies vs. sort-merge, and study recovery issues when most or all of the database fits in main memory. As expected, B+- trees are the preferred storage mechanism unless more than 80-90% of the database fits in main memory. A somewhat surprising result is that hash based query processing strategies are advantageous for large memory situations. Keywords: Access; Algorithms. (Author).

This article provides an overview of recent developments in main-memory database systems. With growing memory sizes and memory prices dropping by a factor of 10 every 5 years, data having a "primary home" in memory is now a reality. Main-memory databases eschew many of the traditional architectural pillars of relational database systems that optimized for disk-resident data. The result of these memory-optimized designs are systems that feature several innovative approaches to fundamental issues (e.g., concurrency control, query processing) that achieve orders of magnitude performance improvements over traditional designs. Our survey covers five main issues and architectural choices that need to be made when building a high performance main-memory optimized database: data organization and storage, indexing, concurrency control, durability and recovery techniques, and query processing and compilation. We focus our survey on four commercial and research systems: H-Store/VoltDB, Hekaton, HyPer, and SAP HANA. These systems are diverse in their design choices and form a representative sample of the state of the art in main-memory database systems. We also cover other commercial and academic systems, along with current and future research trends.

When it comes to choosing, using, and maintaining a database, understanding its internals is essential. But with so many distributed databases and tools available today, it’s often difficult to understand what each one offers and how they differ. With this practical guide, Alex Petrov guides developers through the concepts behind modern database and storage engine internals. Throughout the book, you’ll explore relevant material gleaned from numerous books, papers, blog posts, and the source code of several open source databases. These resources are listed at the end of parts one and two. You’ll discover that the most significant distinctions among many modern databases reside in subsystems that determine how storage is organized and how data is distributed. This book examines: Storage engines: Explore storage classification and taxonomy, and dive into B-Tree-based and immutable Log Structured storage engines, with differences and use-cases for each Storage building blocks: Learn how database files are organized to build efficient storage, using auxiliary data structures such as Page Cache, Buffer Pool and Write-Ahead Log Distributed systems: Learn step-by-step how nodes and processes connect and build complex communication patterns Database clusters: Which consistency models are commonly used by modern databases and how distributed storage systems achieve consistency

This book is an anthology of the results of research and development in database query processing during the past decade. The relational model of data provided tremendous impetus for research into query processing. Since a relational query does not specify access paths to the stored data, the database management system (DBMS) must provide an intelligent query-processing subsystem which will evaluate a number of potentially efficient strategies for processing the query and select the one that optimizes a given performance measure. The degree of sophistication of this subsystem, often called the optimizer, critically affects the performance of the DBMS. Research into query processing thus started has taken off in several directions during the past decade. The emergence of research into distributed databases has enormously complicated the tasks of the optimizer. In a distributed environment, the database may be partitioned into horizontal or vertical fragments of relations. Replicas of the fragments may be stored in different sites of a network and even migrate to other sites. The measure of performance of a query in a distributed system must include the communication cost between sites. To minimize communication costs for-queries involving multiple relations across multiple sites, optimizers may also have to consider semi-join techniques.