From ARIES to MARS: Reengineering Transaction Management for Next-Generation, Solid-State Drives

Systems that provide powerful transaction mechanisms often rely on write-ahead logging (WAL) implementations that were designed with slow, disk-based systems in mind. The emerging class of fast, byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies (e.g., phase change memories, spin-torque MRAMs, and the memristor), however, present performance characteristics very different from both disks and flash-based SSDs. This paper addresses the problem of designing a WAL scheme optimized for these fast NVM-based storage systems. We examine the features that a system like ARIES, a WAL algorithm popular for databases, must provide and separate them from the implementation decisions ARIES makes to optimize for disk-based systems. We design a new NVMoptimized WAL scheme (called MARS) in tandem with a novel SSD multi-part atomic write primitive that combine to provide the same features as ARIES does without any of the disk-centric limitations. The new atomic write primitive makes the log’s contents visible to the application, allowing for a simpler and faster implementation. MARS provides atomicity, durability, and high performance by leveraging the enormous internal bandwidth and high degree of parallelism that advanced SSDs will provide. We have implemented MARS and the novel visible atomic write primitive in a next-generation SSD. This paper demonstrates the overhead of the primitive is minimal compared to normal writes, and our hardware provides large speedups for transactional updates to hash tables, b-trees, and large graphs. MARS outperforms ARIES by up to 3.7⇥ while reducing software complexity.