Database-Aware Semantically-Smart Storage

Recent research has demonstrated the potential benefits of building storage arrays that understand the file systems above them. Such "semantically-smart" disk systems use knowledge of file system structures and operations to improve performance, availability, and even security in ways that are precluded in a traditional storage system architecture.

In this paper, we study the applicability of semantically smart disk technology underneath database management systems. For three case studies, we analyze the differences when building database-aware storage. We find that semantically-smart disk systems can be successfully applied underneath a database, but that new techniques, such as log snooping and explicit access statistics, are needed.