Evaluating persistent memory range indexes

Abstract

Scalable persistent memory (PM) has opened up new opportunities for building indexes that operate and persist data directly on the memory bus, potentially enabling instant recovery, low latency and high throughput. When real PM hardware (Intel Optane Persistent Memory) first became available, previous work evaluated PM indexes proposed in the pre-Optane era. Since then, newer indexes based on real PM have appeared, but it is unclear how they compare to each other and to previous proposals, and what further challenges remain. This paper addresses these issues by analyzing and experimentally evaluating state-of-the-art PM range indexes built for real PM. We find that newer designs inherited past techniques with new improvements, but do not necessarily outperform pre-Optane era proposals. Moreover, PM indexes are often very competitive with or even outperform indexes tailored for DRAM, highlighting the potential of using a unified design for both PM and DRAM. Functionality-wise, these indexes still lack good support for variable-length keys and handling NUMA effect. Based on our findings, we distill new design principles and highlight future directions.