Computer architecture support for database applications
Kimberly Keeton, David A. Patterson · 1999
Computer Architecture Support for Database Applications by Kimberly Kristine Keeton Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California at Berkeley Professor David A. Patterson, Chair Database workloads are an important class of applications, responsible for one-third of the symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) server market. Despite their importance, they are seldom used in computer architecture performance evaluations, which favor technical applications, such as SPEC. Database applications are often avoided because they are difficult to study in fully-scaled configurations, for reasons including large hardware requirements and complicated software configuration and tuning issues. This dissertation addresses several of the challenges posed by database workloads. First, we characterize the architectural behavior of two standard database workloads, namely online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision support (DSS), running on a commercial database on a commodity Intel...