DBMSs on a Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?

Recent high-performance processors employ sophisticated techniques to overlap and simultaneously execute multiple computation and memory operations. Intuitively, these techniques should help database applications, which are becoming increasingly compute and memory bound. Unfortunately, recent studies report that faster processors do not improve database system performance to the same extent as scientific workloads. Recent work on database systems focusing on minimizing memory latencies, such as cache-conscious algorithms for sorting and data placement, is one step toward addressing this problem. However, to best design high performance DBMSs we must carefully evaluate and understand the processor and memory behavior of commercial DBMSs on today’s hardware platforms. In this paper we answer the question “Where does time go when a database system is executed on a modern computer platform?” We examine four commercial DBMSs running on an Intel Xeon and NT 4.0. We introduce a framewo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Anastassia Ailamaki, David J. DeWitt, Mark D. Hill, David A. Wood
• Keywords: Commercial Dbmss, Data Placement, Database, VLDB 1999