Engineering High-Performance Database Engines

Developing a database engine is both challenging and re-warding. Database engines are very complex software arti-facts that have to scale to large data sizes and large hardware configurations, and developing such systems usually means choosing between different trade-offs at various points of de-velopment. This papers gives a survey over two different database en-gines, the disk-based SPARQL-processing engine RDF-3X, and the relational main-memory engine HyPer. It discusses the design choices that were made during development, and highlights optimization techniques that are important for both systems. 1