Performance Improvement of Database Compression for OLTP Workloads

As data volumes explode, data storage costs become a large fraction of total IT costs. We can reduce the costs substantially by using compression. However, it is generally known that database compression is not suitable for write-intensive workloads. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive solution to improve the performance of compressed databases for write-intensive OLTP workloads. We find that storing data too densely in compressed pages incurs many future page splits, which require exclusive locks. In order to avoid lock contention, we reduce page splits by sacrificing a couple of percent of space savings. We reserve enough space in each compressed page for future updates of records and prevent page merges that are prone to incur page splits in the near future. The experimental results using TPC-C benchmark and MySQL/InnoDB show that our method gives 1.5 times higher throughput with 33% space savings compared with the uncompressed counterpart and 1.8 times higher throughput with only 1% more space compared with the state-of-the-art compression method developed by Facebook.