Towards Flash Disk Use in Databases - Improving Performance While Saving Energy!

Green computing or energy saving when processing information is primarily considered a task of processor development. We, however, advocate that a holistic approach is necessary to reduce power consumption to a minimum. We explore the potential of NAND flash memory in comparison to magnetic disks for DBMS-based architectures. For this reason, we attempt to identify the IO performance of both storage types at the device level and file system interface, before we approach the most important question how DBMS applications can take advantage of the flash performance characteristics. Furthermore, based on an analysis of storage structures and related benchmark runs in our XTC system, we discuss how IO-intensive DBMS algorithms have to be adjusted to take most out of the flash technology. First results can be reported concerning tailor-made DB buffer management for flash-based databases. The ultimate goal is to substantially improve energy efficiency while comparable performance as in disk-based DB servers is maintained.