June 28, 2006

Good DATallegro/Intel white paper

I really like this short white paper, which carries the personal byline of Stuart Frost. Stuart is DATallegro’s CEO, and also the guy who does analyst relations for them (at least in my case). Part of it just does a concise job of spelling out some of the DATallegro story. But the rest is about the comparison between Intel’s new dual-core “Woodcrest” Xeons and their single-core predecessors. Not only does it give credible statistics, it gives understanding of the reasons behind them.

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May 8, 2006

Memory-centric data management whitepaper

I have finally finished and uploaded the long-awaited white paper on memory-centric data management.

This is the project for which I origially coined the term “memory-centric data management,” after realizing that the prevalent “in-memory DBMS” creates all sorts of confusion about how and whether data persists on disk. The white paper clarifies and updates points I have been making about memory-centric data management since last summer. Sponsors included:

If there’s one area in my research I’m not 100% satisfied with, it may be the question of where the true hardware bottlenecks to memory-centric data management lie (it’s obvious that the bottleneck to disk-centric data management is random disk access). Is it processor interconnect (around 1 GB/sec)? Is it processor-to-cache connections (around 5 GB/sec)? My prior pronouncements, the main body of the white paper, and the Intel Q&A appendix to the white paper may actually have slightly different spins on these points.

And by the way — the current hard limit on RAM/board isn’t 2^64 bytes, but a “mere” 2^40. But don’t worry; it will be up to 2^48 long before anybody actually puts 256 gigabytes under the control of a single processor.

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