Polynesia: Enabling Effective Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Databases with Specialized Hardware/Software Co-Design

Understand

An exponential growth in data volume, combined with increasing demand for real-time analysis (i.e., using the most recent data), has resulted in the emergence of database systems that concurrently support transactions and data analytics.

• These hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) database systems can support real-time data analysis without the high costs of synchronizing across separate single-purpose databases.
• Unfortunately, for many applications that perform a high rate of data updates, state-of-the-art HTAP systems incur significant drops in transactional (up to 74.6%) and/or analytical (up to 49.8%) throughput compared to performing only transactions or only analytics in isolation, due to (1) data movement between the CPU and memory, (2) data update propagation, and (3) consistency costs.
• We propose Polynesia, a hardware-software co-designed system for in-memory HTAP databases.