WOBTree: a write-optimized B plus -tree for non-volatile memory

The emergence of non-volatile memory (NVM) has introduced new opportunities for performance optimizations in existing storage systems. To better utilize its byte-addressability and near-DRAM performance, NVM can be attached on the memory bus and accessed via load/store memory instructions rather than the conventional block interface. In this scenario, a cache line (usually 64 bytes) becomes the data transfer unit between volatile and non-volatile devices. However, the failure-atomicity of write on NVM is the memory bit width (usually 8 bytes). This mismatch between the data transfer unit and the atomicity unit may introduce write amplification and compromise data consistency of node-based data structures such as B+-trees. In this paper, we propose WOBTree, a Write-Optimized B+-Tree for NVM to address the mismatch problem without expensive logging. WOBTree minimizes the update granularity from a tree node to a much smaller subnode and carefully arranges the write operations in it to ensure crash consistency and reduce write amplification. Experimental results show that compared with previous persistent B+-tree solutions, WOBTree reduces the write amplification by up to 86x and improves write performance by up to 61x while maintaining similar search performance.