Data Management in Non-Volatile Memory

Non-volatile memory promises to bridge the gap between main memory and secondary storage by offering a universal storage device. Its performance profile is unique in that its latency is close to main memory and it is byte addressable, but it exhibits asymmetric I/O in that writes are more expensive than reads. These properties imply that it cannot act as a drop-in replacement for either main-memory or disk. Therefore, we must revisit the salient aspects of data management in light of this new technology. In what follows we present the current work in the area with a view towards identifying the open problems and exposing the research opportunities. In particular, we address issues like: ( a) incorporating non-volatile memory into the data management stack, (b) supporting transactions and ensuring persistence and recovery, and (c) query processing.