research-article

Incrementally parallelizing database transactions with thread-level speculation

Authors:

Christopher B. Colohan,

Anastassia Ailamaki,

J. Gregory Steffan,

Todd C. MowryAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), Volume 26, Issue 1

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 50

https://doi.org/10.1145/1328671.1328673

Published: 10 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

With the advent of chip multiprocessors, exploiting intratransaction parallelism in database systems is an attractive way of improving transaction performance. However, exploiting intratransaction parallelism is difficult for two reasons: first, significant changes are required to avoid races or conflicts within the DBMS; and second, adding threads to transactions requires a high level of sophistication from transaction programmers. In this article we show how dividing a transaction into speculative threads solves both problems—it minimizes the changes required to the DBMS, and the details of parallelization are hidden from the transaction programmer. Our technique requires a limited number of small, localized changes to a subset of the low-level data structures in the DBMS. Through this method of incrementally parallelizing transactions, we can dramatically improve performance: on a simulated four-processor chip-multiprocessor, we improve the response time by 44--66% for three of the five TPC-C transactions, assuming the availability of idle processors.

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Incrementally parallelizing database transactions with thread-level speculation

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cover image ACM Transactions on Computer Systems

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems Volume 26, Issue 1

February 2008

153 pages

ISSN:0734-2071

EISSN:1557-7333

DOI:10.1145/1328671

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 10 March 2008

Accepted: 01 November 2007

Revised: 01 August 2007

Received: 01 July 2006

Published in TOCS Volume 26, Issue 1

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Cited By

Fang HYeh MKuo TShin SMaldonado J(2013)MLC-flash-friendly logging and recovery for databasesProceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/2480362.2480648(1541-1546)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2480362.2480648
Zhao LYang J(2013)Resources Snapshot Model for Concurrent Transactions in Multi-Core ProcessorsJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.1007/s11390-013-1315-728:1(106-118)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2013
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-013-1315-7
Bog APlattner HZeier A(2011)A mixed transaction processing and operational reporting benchmarkInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-010-9283-813:3(321-335)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10796-010-9283-8
Rashid LHassanein WHammad MFoglia PPrete CBartolini SGiorgi R(2008)Exploiting multithreaded architectures to improve the hash join operationProceedings of the 9th workshop on MEmory performance: DEaling with Applications, systems and architecture10.1145/1509084.1509091(46-53)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1509084.1509091

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