How to Write to SSDs
Bohyun Lee, Tobias Ziegler, Viktor Leis · Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · 2026
This paper demonstrates that adopting out-of-place writes is essential for database systems to fully leverage SSD performance and extend SSD lifespan. We propose a set of out-of-place optimizations that collectively reduce write amplification across both the DBMS and SSD layers. We redesign the in-place, B-tree-based LeanStore to write out-of-place and support these optimizations, and evaluate it on diverse OLTP benchmarks, dataset sizes, and SSDs. The final design improves throughput by 1.65–2.24× and reduces flash writes per operation by 6.2–9.8× on YCSB-A. On TPC-C with 15,000 warehouses, throughput improves by 2.45× while flash writes decrease by 7.2×. Finally, we show that the architecture can seamlessly support novel SSD interfaces such as ZNS and FDP.