Towards Sustainable High-Performance Transaction Processing in Cloud-based DBMS

Cloud-based databases often decouple database instances from physical storage to provide reliability and high availability to users. This design can robustly handle a single point of failure but needs substantial effort to attain good performance. In this paper, we analyze the decoupled architecture and present important optimization issues that we found while implementing this design. For implementing the prototyped system, we decouple MariaDB into a database instance and storage managing both transaction log and data pages. We also explore design considerations for transaction processing performance in the front-end side and efficient way of guaranteeing data durability in the back-end side. We evaluate the prototyped system using standard database benchmarks, and experimental results show that adopting the decoupled architecture for cloud-based DBMSs needs to address numerous optimization issues for achieving better performance.