Database Joins on Modern Hardware

Computing hardware today provides abundant compute performance. But various I/O bottlenecks—which cannot keep up with the exponential growth of Moore's Law—limit the extent to which this performance can be harvested for data-intensive tasks, database tasks in particular. Modern systems try to hide these limitations with sophisticated techniques such as caching, simultaneous multi-threading, or out-of-order execution.

In the talk I will discuss whether/how database join algorithms can benefit from these sophisticated techniques. As I will show in the talk, database alone is not good enough to hide its own limitations. But once database algorithms are made aware of the hardware characteristics, they achieve unprecedented performance, pairing hundreds of millions of database tuples per second.

The work reported in this work has been conducted in the context of the Avalanche project at ETH Zurich and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).