A flash-aware buffering scheme using on-the-fly redo

Abstract

In this paper, we address how to reduce the amount of page updates in flash-based DBMS equipped with SSD (solid state drive). We propose a novel buffering scheme that evicts a dirty page X without flushing it into SSD, and restores the right image of X when X is requested for later access. The restoration of X having previous flushing-less eviction is performed through our online redo actions on X. We call this page-restoring online redo the on-the-fly redo. Although our on-the-fly redo mechanism has some overhead of increasing the number of page reads, this can be compensated by infrequent page updates. Additionally, since the proposed buffering scheme with the on-the-fly redo can easily support the no-steal policy in buffer management, we can enjoy the advantages of smaller logging overhead and faster recovery. Through the TPC-C benchmarks using a Berkeley DB, we show that our scheme shortens the transaction processing times by up to 53%.