Query Processing on Multi-Core Architectures

The upcoming generation of computer hardware poses several new challenges for database developers and engineers. Software in general and database management systems (DBMSs) in particular will no longer benefit from performance gains of future hardware due to increase clock speed, as it was the case for the last 35 years; instead, the number of cores per CPU will increase steadily. Today’s approach is to run each query on a single core or only a few different cores using parallel query execution. This approach suffers from several problems (e.g. contention problem) and therefore leads to poor speed up and scale up behavior. These observations open several important research questions on how to use the new multi-core CPU architecture for improving the overall performance of DBMSs. This paper outlines our approach for query processing on multi-core CPU architectures. We present an abstract architecture view for multi-core CPUs, meta operators to control and to interact with the hardware, and a new query operator model that makes use of the meta operators to control the parallel execution of a query over different cores. We illustrate how each of these parts fits in our framework for query processing on multi-core architectures.