Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 13:52
IT Industry -
Development
Page 1 of 3
A new database engine for Ingres promises dramatic speed improvements. The technology has been developed in conjunction with a European research institute and Intel.
The Ingres VectorWise project aims to take full advantage of modern processors and storage hardware, and initial results show more than tenfold performance gains.
Nearly 80-fold improvements have been seen on certain queries running on Intel Xeon 5500 series based hardware.
According to an Ingres white paper, most studies have found that database engines do not benefit from recent CPU features such as out of order execution and chip multithreading.
VectorWise gets its speed from a combination of a high-performance query processor and a new data storage architecture that combines column- and row-wise data, compression, and table clustering.
Passing entire vectors of data values through the pipeline and carrying out in-cache processing means more work can be done per cycle, and keeping data compressed until it is actually needed speeds queries that would otherwise be limited by I/O or main memory bandwidth.
This also makes VectorWise more storage efficient. According to the white paper, data-intensive workloads only need storage capacity of no more than twice the actual database size, where conventional relational engines are typically configured with ten times the data volume.
So how much faster is it? Find out on page 2.
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