Survey on Transactional Storage Systems Based on Non-Volatile Memory

With the emergence and further widespread use of non-volatile memory, the storage architecture is undergoing fundamental change. Transaction processing technologies in traditional database systems and file systems are mostly designed for rotating disks while they cannot take full advantage of new features of non-volatile memory. To take full advantage of the non-volatile memory characteristics and narrow the gap between system I/O performance and CPU processing performance, transactional storage systems and technologies designed based on non-volatile memory have gained focus and great popularity. In this paper, current status of the software layer transaction processing technologies, which are used in traditional database systems and file systems, are addressed in brief firstly. Then based on the division of non-volatile memory which includes flash and phase-change memory, the existing transactional storage systems based on non-volatile memory are discussed. Finally, the research works are summarized and the possible research directions are pointed out. Among the discussion, for the research of transactional flash-based storage systems, analysis of the optimization of transaction processing technologies using traditional host interface flash storage devices is given first, followed by analysis and comparison of the characteristics of the transaction flash storage systems using dedicated transactional interfaces. For the research of transactional PCM-based transactional storage systems, using PCM in both main memory and external storage environment for transaction processing is analyzed and compared, and the key technologies including the combination of log and cache and fine-grained logging are discussed.