Accelerating Analytical Processing in MVCC using Fine-Granular High-Frequency Virtual Snapshotting

Efficient transaction management is a delicate task. As systems face transactions of inherently different types, ranging from point updates to long-running analytical queries, it is hard to satisfy their requirements with a single execution engine. Unfortunately, most systems rely on such a design that implements its parallelism using multi-version concurrency control. While MVCC parallelizes short-running OLTP transactions well, it struggles in the presence of mixed workloads containing long-running OLAP queries, as scans have to work their way through vast amounts of versioned data. To overcome this problem, we reintroduce the concept of hybrid processing and combine it with state-of-the-art MVCC: OLAP queries are outsourced to run on separate virtual snapshots while OLTP transactions run on the most recent version of the database. Inside both execution engines, we still apply MVCC. The most significant challenge of a hybrid approach is to generate the snapshots at a high frequency. Previous approaches heavily suffered from the high cost of snapshot creation. In our approach termed AnKer, we follow the current trend of co-designing underlying system components and the DBMS, to overcome the restrictions of the OS by introducing a custom system call vm_snapshot. It allows fine-granular snapshot creation that is orders of magnitudes faster than state-of-the-art approaches. Our experimental evaluation on an HTAP workload based on TPC-C transactions and OLAP queries show that our snapshotting mechanism is more than a factor of 100x faster than fork-based snapshotting and that the latency of OLAP queries is up to a factor of 4x lower than MVCC in a single execution engine. Besides, our approach enables a higher OLTP throughput than all state-of-the-art methods.