Shore-MT: a scalable storage manager for the multicore era

Database storage managers have long been able to efficiently handle multiple concurrent requests. Until recently, however, a computer contained only a few single-core CPUs, and therefore only a few transactions could simultaneously access the storage manager's internal structures. This allowed storage managers to use non-scalable approaches without any penalty. With the arrival of multicore chips, however, this situation is rapidly changing. More and more threads can run in parallel, stressing the internal scalability of the storage manager. Systems optimized for high performance at a limited number of cores are not assured similarly high performance at a higher core count, because unanticipated scalability obstacles arise. We benchmark four popular open-source storage managers (Shore, BerkeleyDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL) on a modern multicore machine, and find that they all suffer in terms of scalability. We briefly examine the bottlenecks in the various storage engines. We then p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EDBT
• Authors: Ryan Johnson, Ippokratis Pandis, Nikos Hardavellas, Anastasia Ailamaki, Babak Falsafi
• Keywords: Database, Database Storage Managers, EDBT 2009, Scalability, Storage Managers