NoFTL: database systems on FTL-less flash storage

Authors:
Sergej Hardock;Ilia Petrov;Robert Gottstein;Alejandro Buchmann
Affiliations:
Databases and Distributed Systems Group, TU-Darmstadt, Germany;Data Management Lab, Reutlingen University, Germany;Databases and Distributed Systems Group, TU-Darmstadt, Germany;Databases and Distributed Systems Group, TU-Darmstadt, Germany
Venue:
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Year:
2013

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Abstract

The database architecture and workhorse algorithms have been designed to compensate for hard disk properties. The I/O characteristics of Flash memories have significant impact on database systems and many algorithms and approaches taking advantage of those have been proposed recently. Nonetheless on system level Flash storage devices are still treated as HDD compatible block devices, black boxes and fast HDD replacements. This backwards compatibility (both software and hardware) masks the native behaviour, incurs significant complexity and decreases I/O performance, making it non-robust and unpredictable. Database systems have a long tradition of operating directly on RAW storage natively, utilising the physical characteristics of storage media to improve performance. In this paper we demonstrate an approach called NoFTL that goes a step further. We show that allowing for native Flash access and integrating parts of the FTL functionality into the database system yields significant performance increase and simplification of the I/O stack. We created a real-time data-driven Flash emulator and integrated it accordingly into Shore-MT. We demonstrate a performance improvement of up to 3.7× compared to Shore-MT on RAW block-device Flash storage under various TPC workloads.