Scaling and Charact rizing Database Workloads: Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice
Proceedings of the 36th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
DBmbench: fast and accurate database workload representation on modern microarchitecture
CASCON '05 Proceedings of the 2005 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
Speculative return address stack management revisited
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)
Phantom-BTB: a virtualized branch target buffer design
Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
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This paper presents a detailed branch characterization of an Oracle based commercial on-line transaction processing workload, Oracle Database Benchmark (ODB), running on an IA32 processor. We ran a well-tuned ODB on Simics, a full system simulator, to collect the instruction traces used in this study. We compare the branch behavior of ODB with the branch behaviors of gcc, gzip and mcf from the SPECINT 2000 benchmark suite. Contrary to the popular belief that databases have unpredictable branches, we show that using largerpredictors that capture enough branch history information, and using branch prediction schemes that reduce aliasing, conditional branches in ODB are more predictable than in gcc, gzip and mcf. Due to frequent context switching in ODB, a hardware return address stack is ineffective in predicting return addresses for ODB. Based on further analysis, we propose and evaluate an enhanced return address predictor, which reduces return address mispredictions in ODB by 40%.