Alberto Lerner

Affiliation: University of Fribourg
Title: Use Cases in Database-SSD Co-Design
Slides: PDF

Abstract

SSDs have slowly but surely been offering more specialized interfaces than the traditional block device one. The recent KV and ZNS SSDs are examples of this trend. They are both standard NVMe devices that are commercially available now. From a database point of view, these devices offer what amounts to access methods rather than the usual read/write interfaces. These are welcome additions to the database builder tool chest.

This talk introduces two other SSD prototypes that we developed that can further help. In the first one, we show an SSD that offers performance counters at the individual IO requests level. Using that information, the database builder can locate and explain performance issues in the database's workloads. In the second SSD, we present a device with an advanced level of integration with the database. It targets specifically the transaction log workload. We hope to show with these devices that we barely started to explore the space for co-designing databases and SSDs.

Short CV

Alberto Lerner is a Senior Researcher at the eXascale Infolab at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His interests include systems that explore closely coupling of hardware and software to realize untapped performance and/or functionality. Previously, he spent years in the industry consulting for large, data-hungry verticals such as finance and advertisement. He had also been part of the teams behind a few different database engines: IBM's DB2, working on robustness aspects of the query optimizer, Google's Bigtable, on elasticity aspects, and MongoDB, on general architecture. Alberto received his Ph.D. from ENST - Paris (now ParisTech), having done his thesis research work at INRIA/Rocquencourt and NYU. He's also done post-doctoral work at IBM Research (both at T.J. Watson and Almaden).