Early Experience and Evaluation of File Systems on SSD with Database Applications

Abstract

Flash SSDs are being incorporated in many enterprise storage platforms recently. However, the characteristics of the flash SSD are quite different from that of hard disk. The IO strategies in the existing systems should be carefully evaluated. This paper provides an evaluation on the flash-based transaction processing system. Two file systems, traditional in-place update-based file system and log-structured file system, are selected as the representative of two write strategies. Usually, the log-structured file system is believed to play better on flash SSDs. Our experiment shows that the performance results of two database applications are diverse with two file systems on different flash SSDs. We analyze the performance in different configurations. Based on the analysis, we provide our experience on building the flash-based database system to better utilize the performance benefits of flash SSDs.