Accelerating Database Workloads with DM-WriteCache and Persistent Memory

Businesses today need systems that provide faster access to critical and frequently used data. Digitization has led to a rapid explosion of this business data, and thereby an increase in the database footprint. In-memory computing is one possible solution to meet the performance needs of such large databases, but the rate of data growth far exceeds the amount of memory that can hold the data. The computer industry is striving to remain on the cutting edge of technologies that accelerate performance, guard against data loss, and minimize downtime. The evolution towards a memory-centric architecture is driving development of newer memory technologies such as Persistent Memory (aka Storage Class Memory or Non-Volatile Memory [1]), as an answer to these pressing needs. In this paper, we present the use cases of storage class memory (or persistent memory) as a write-back cache to accelerate commit-sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP) database workloads. We provide an overview of Persistent Memory, a new technology that offers current generation of high-performance solutions a low latency-storage option that is byte-addressable. We also introduce the Linux kernel's new feature "DM-WriteCache", a write-back cache decades the computing industry has been researching ways to reduce the performance gap implemented on top of persistent memory solutions. And finally we present data from our tests that demonstrate how this technology adoption can enable existing OLTP applications to scale their performance.