Fast computation of database operations using content-addressable memories

Research efforts on conventional CPU architectures over the past decade have focused primarily on performance enhancement. In contrast, the NPU (Network Processing Unit) architectures have evolved significantly in terms of functionality.. The memory hierarchy of a typical network router features a Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) which provides very fast constant-time lookups over large amounts of data and facilitates a wide range of novel high-speed networking solutions such as Packet Classification, Intrusion Detection and Pattern Matching. While these networking applications span an entirely different domain than the database applications, they share a common operation of searching for a particular data entry among huge amounts of data. In this paper, we investigate how CAM-based technology can help in addressing the existing memory hierarchy bottlenecks in database operations. We present several high-speed CAM-based solutions for computationally intensive database operations. In particular, we discuss an efficient linear-time complexity CAM-based sorting algorithm and apply it to develop a fast solution for complex join operations widely used in database applications.