LeanStore: In-Memory Data Management Beyond Main Memory

Disk-based database systems use buffer managers in order to transparently manage data sets larger than main memory. This traditional approach is effective at minimizing the number of I/O operations, but is also the major source of overhead in comparison with in-memory systems. To avoid this overhead, in-memory database systems therefore abandon buffer management altogether, which makes handling data sets larger than main memory very difficult. In this work, we revisit this fundamental dichotomy and design a novel storage manager that is optimized for modern hardware. Our evaluation, which is based on TPC-C and micro benchmarks, shows that our approach has little overhead in comparison with a pure in-memory system when all data resides in main memory. At the same time, like a traditional buffer manager, it is fully transparent and can manage very large data sets effectively. Furthermore, due to low-overhead synchronization, our implementation is also highly scalable on multi-core CPUs.