BaSE (Byte addressable Storage Engine) Access Method

Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) is an emerging memory technology that combines the best properties of today’s hard disks and today’s main memory by combining non-volatility, high density, high speed, and byte addressability. This provides an opportunity to redesign systems and their software stacks to improve performance and to reduce the system and software complexity. Present-day database systems are designed and optimized for traditional disks and deep memory hierarchies. This makes them very complex because they have to handle varying levels of storage latencies, from CPU caches to hard disks. Our intention is to build a prototype storage engine optimized for NVM to take advantage of the collapsed memory hierarchy, and to develop this storage engine in an incremental way. In this paper, we discuss the optimizations for the data access module. We modified the B-tree access module of an open source storage engine, which reduced the lock contention by 99.6%, i.e., by a factor of 273.