Designing a persistent-memory-native storage engine for SQL database systems

We illustrate the design of our in-house storage engine for SQL database systems. The storage engine is designed to be persistent-memory native, meaning that database and transaction log files are placed on persistent memory and accessed with byte granularity from the storage engine. In addition, it is aimed to be practical in industry and highly performant with the use of persistent memory. In this paper, we discuss five essential requirements for such a storage engine to be practical in industry and how they are met in our in-house storage engine. Furthermore, we highlight two important design features, namely, (1) the pre-fault feature and (2) the parallel-logging feature, that have been incorporated to our in-house storage engine, to improve its performance. By meeting the five essential requirements and incorporating the two design features to our in-house storage engine, we implement a persistent-memory-native storage engine for SQL database systems, in-house, that satisfies industry requirements and that is highly performant on write workload on persistent memory.