SW-WAL: Leveraging Address Remapping of SSDs to Achieve Single-Write Write-Ahead Logging

Write-ahead logging (WAL) has been widely used to provide transactional atomicity in databases, such as SQLite and MySQL/InnoDB. However, the WAL introduces duplicate writes, where changes are recorded in the WAL file and then written to the database file, called checkpointing writes. On the other hand, NAND flash-based SSDs, which have an inherent indirection software layer, called flash translation layer (FTL), become commonplace in modern storage systems. Innovative SSD designs have been proposed to eliminate the WAL overheads by exploiting the FTL, such as providing an atomic write interface or utilizing its address remapping. However, these designs introduce significant performance overheads of maintaining and persisting extra transactional information to guarantee the transactional atomicity or mapping consistency. In this paper, we propose single-write WAL (SW-WAL), a novel cross-layer design, to eliminate WAL-induced duplicate writes on SSDs with minimal overheads. The SSD exposes an address remapping interface to the host, through which the checkpointing writes can be completed without conducting real data writes. To ensure the transactional atomicity and mapping consistency, we make the SSD aware of the transactional writes to the WAL file. Specifically, when transactional data are written to the WAL file, both transactional and mapping semantics are delivered from the host to the SSD and persisted in relevant flash pages as housekeeping metadata without any extra overheads. We implement a prototype of SW-WAL, which runs a popular database SQLite on an emulated NVMe SSD. Experimental results show that SW-WAL improves the database performance by up to 62% compared with original SQLite that bears the WAL overheads and up to 32% compared with the state-of-the-art design that eliminates the WAL overheads.