Performance Evaluation of Extended Storage Architectures for Transaction Processing

The use of non-volatile semiconductor memory within an extended storage hierarchy promises significant performance itn-provements for transaction processing. Although page-addres-sable semiconductor memories like extended memory, solid-state disks and disk caches are commercially available since several years, no detailed investigation of their use for transac-tion processing has been performed so far. We present a com-prehensive simulation study that compares the performance of these storage types and of different usage forms. The following usage forms are considered: allocation of entire log and data-base files in non-volatile semiconductor memory, using a so-called write buffer to perform disk writes asynchronously, and caching of database pages at intermediate storage levels (in ad-dition to main memory caching). Simulation results will be presented for the debit-credit workload frequently used in transaction processing benchmarks. 1