Managed acceleration for In-Memory database analytic workloads

Abstract

In-Memory Databases, such as SAP HANA, enable new levels of database performance by removing the disk bottleneck and by compressing data in memory. The consequence of this improved performance means that reports and analytic queries can now be processed on demand.Therefore, the goal is now to provide near real-time responses to compute and data intensive analytic queries. To facilitate this, much work has investigated the use of acceleration technologies within the database context. While current research into the application of these technologies has yielded positive results, they have tended to focus on single database tasks or on isolated single user requests.This paper uses SHEPARD, a framework for managing accelerated tasks across shared heterogeneous resources, to introduce acceleration into an In-Memory Database. Results show how, using SHEPARD, multiple simultaneous user queries all receive speed-up by using a shared pool of accelerators. Results also show that o✏oading analytic tasks on to accelerators can have indirect benefits for other database workloads by reducing contention for CPU resources.