A CXL- Powered Database System: Opportunities and Challenges

Compute Express Link (CXL) is emerging as a significant player in the landscape of modern database man-agement systems (DBMS). CXL is an open industry-standard interconnect protocol between processors and devices such as memory buffers. Boasting high bandwidth, low latency, and support for coherency and memory semantics, CXL opens a new direction for addressing the limitations and bottlenecks faced by traditional distributed DBMS, particularly in large-scale data management, efficient query processing, and improving system availability. This paper explores the significant potential of employing CXL in constructing next-generation DBMS. Through a thorough analysis of CXL's key characteristics, this paper identifies emerging opportunities, particularly in buffer pool expansion, memory elasticity, swift data recovery, and index optimization. More importantly, this paper outlines a series of new challenges accompanying these opportunities, with the objective of inspiring cutting-edge approaches in future DBMS design that emphasize efficiency, reliability, and reduced total cost of ownership.