Enhancing recovery using an SSD buffer pool extension

Recent advances in solid state technology have led to the introduction of solid state drives (SSDs). Today's SSDs store data persistently using NAND flash memory and support good random IO performance. Current work in exploiting flash in database systems has primarily focused on using its random IO capability for second level bufferpools below main memory. There has not been much emphasis on exploiting its persistence. In this paper, we describe a mechanism extending our previous work on a SSD Bufferpool on a DB2 LUW prototype, to exploit the SSD persistence for recovery and normal restart. We demonstrate significantly shorter recovery times, and improved performance immediately after recovery completes. We quantify the overhead of supporting recovery and show that the overhead is minimal.