Near-Storage Acceleration of Database Query Processing with SmartSSDs

Smart solid-state drives (SmartSSDs) with onboard FPGAs are becoming mainstream, providing opportunities for near-storage computation, which is appealing for increasing the performance of data-intensive workloads such as database query processing. This paper demonstrates the performance and energy improvements by offloading the filter and aggregation operations to the FPGA on a SmartSSD with real-system experiments. We make the observation that efficiently handling null entries in the data is important. Hence, we propose a novel design to manage the metadata to handle null entries. Our real system evaluation shows that offloading the query operations to the FPGA results in 9.6× improvement in performance while consuming 10.9× less energy compared to a conventional CPU-only query processing.