DBMS Annihilator: A High-Performance Database Workload Generator in Action

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Abstract

Modern DBMS engines can achieve unprecedented transaction processing speed thanks to the invention of clever data structures, concurrency schemes, and improvements in CPU and memory sub-systems. However, developing real and efficient networked clients to benchmark these systems remains daunting. Simply put, traditional client-side networking stacks can present high overheads and thus cannot exercise the high performance that modern DBMSs can, in principle, provide. In this demo, we propose a different approach to benchmarking; we showcase a new framework that leverages hardware-software co-design. Our system, which we call the DBMS Annihilator, allows workloads to be specified in a high-level language that are then converted into hardware (FPGA) for execution. The hardware in case is a commodity smart-NIC, which allows workloads to be fully reproducible to anyone using such hardware. A software console and dashboard provide real time visibility and interactivity, which is what we explore in this demo.