Energy-Efficient Database Systems: A Systematic Survey

Abstract

Constructing energy-efficient database systems to reduce economic costs and environmental impact has been studied for 10 years. With the emergence of the big data age, along with the data-centric and data-intensive computing trend, the great amount of energy consumed by database systems has become a major concern in a society that pursues Green IT. However, to the best of our knowledge, despite the importance of this matter in Green IT, there have been few comprehensive or systematic studies conducted in this field. Therefore, the objective of this article is to present a literature survey with breadth and depth on existing energy management techniques for database systems. The existing literature is organized hierarchically with two major branches focusing separately on energy consumption models and energy-saving techniques. Under each branch, we first introduce some basic knowledge, then we classify, discuss, and compare existing research according to their core ideas, basic approaches, and main characteristics. Finally, based on these observations through our study, we identify multiple open issues and challenges, and provide insights for future research. It is our hope that our outcome of this work will help researchers develop more energy-efficient database systems.