Database Optimizations for Modern Hardware

Databases are an important workload for modern commodity microarchitectures. Achieving the best performance requires that careful attention be paid to the underlying architecture, including instruction and data cache usage, data layout, branch prediction, and multithreading. Specialized commodity microarchitectures, such as graphics cards and network processors, have also been investigated as effective query coprocessors. This paper presents a survey of recent architecture-sensitive database research. The insights gained from optimizing database performance on modern microarchitectures are also applicable to other domains, particularly those that are similarly data intensive.