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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Fast transactions for multicore in-memory databases

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Though modern multicore machines have sufficient RAM and processors to manage very large in-memory databases, it is not clear what the best strategy for dividing work among cores is. Should each core handle a data partition, avoiding the overhead of concurrency control for most transactions (at the cost of increasing it for cross-partition transactions)? Or should cores access a shared data structure instead? We investigate this question in the context of a fast in-memory database. We describe a new transactionally consistent database storage engine called MAFLINGO. Its cache-centered data structure design provides excellent base key-value store performance, to which we add a new, cache-friendly serializable protocol and support for running large, read-only transactions on a recent snapshot. On a key-value workload, the resulting system introduces negligible performance overhead as compared to a version of our system with transactional support stripped out, while achieving linear scalability versus the number of cores. It also exhibits linear scalability on TPC-C, a popular transactional benchmark. In addition, we show that a partitioning-based approach ceases to be beneficial if the database cannot be partitioned such that only a small fraction of transactions access multiple partitions, making our shared-everything approach more relevant. Finally, based on a survey of results from the literature, we argue that our implementation substantially outperforms previous main-memory databases on TPC-C benchmarks.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2013

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Tu, Stephen Lyle
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Samuel R. Madden.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82375
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/82375

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Tu, Stephen Lyle. Fast transactions for multicore in-memory databases. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82375