DaC scan: a novel scan operator for exploiting SSD internal parallelism

Abstract

SummarySolid‐state drives (SSDs) have become an attractive alternative for storing large databases. Solid‐state drives do not present mechanical parts in their assembly. Consequently, SSDs have different characteristics and capabilities than magnetic disks Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). One of the most important features of SSDs is the fact that they implement different levels of internal parallelism for executing read/write operations. In database query processing, the table scan operator is responsible for reading an entire table. Generally, a scan operator is utilized whenever there is no index defined on the table to be accessed. This paper introduces a novel scan operator, denoted DaC Scan, for reading database tables stored in SSDs. The key goal of the proposed operator is to explore IO parallelism. Thus, the idea is to make DaC Scan able to read different regions of a single table simultaneously. For validation of DaC Scan efficiency, experiments with a prototype have been conducted over the TPC‐H benchmark database, scale factors 10 and 20. The results show that DaC Scan is efficient, presenting significant gains w.r.t. classical scan operators.