New Storage Devices and the Future of Database Management

At the beginning of the paper, it is demonstrated that the technology of the most widely used SQL-oriented database management systems (DBMS) is inextricably linked with the technology of hard disk drives with movable heads (HDD). Features of HDD affect the data structures and algorithms for performing operations, methods of managing the buffer pool of the DBMS, transaction management, query optimization, etc. At present, new types of data storage hardware have appeared: block solid-state drives (SSD) and storage-class memory (SCM). SSD characteristics made it expedient to develop a DBMS in terms of their exclusive use, but so far, no such DBMS has been created, and SSDs are used simply instead of HDDs in DBMSs that do not take into account their features. The availability of SCM enables radical simplification of the architecture of the database systems and significantly improve their performance. To do this, we need to rethink many of the ideas used in disk-based databases.