PLP: Page Latch-free Shared-everything OLTP

Scaling the performance of shared-everything on-line transaction processing to highly-parallel multicore hardware remains a great challenge for database system designers. Developments in OLTP technology remove locking and logging from being scalability bottlenecks on such systems, leaving page latching as the next potential problem. To tackle the page latching problem, we design a system around physiological partitioning (PLP). The PLP design applies logical-only partitioning, maintaining the desired properties of shared-everything designs, and introduces a multi-rooted B+Tree index structure (MRBTree) which allows us to partition the accesses at the physical page level. That is, logical partitioning, along with MRBTrees ensure that all accesses to a given index page come from a single thread and, hence, can be entirely latch-free. We extend the design to make heap page accesses thread-private as well. The elimination of page latching allows us to simplify key code paths in the system such as B+Tree operations leading to more efficient yet easier maintainable code. The profiling of a prototype PLP system shows that it acquires 85% and 68% fewer contentious critical sections per transaction than an optimized conventional design and one based on logical-only partitioning respectively. As a result the PLP prototype improves performance by up to 40% and 18% over the two systems on two multicore machines.