Exploring Power-Performance Tradeoffs in Database Systems

With the total energy consumption of computing systems increasing in a steep rate, much attention has been paid to the design of energy-efficient computing systems and applications. So far, database system design has focused on improving performance of query processing. The objective of this study is to experimentally explore the potential of power conservation in relational database management systems. We hypothesize that, by modifying the query optimizer in a DBMS to take the power cost of query plans into consideration, we will be able to reduce the power usage of database servers and control the tradeoffs between power consumption and system performance. We also identify the sources of such savings by investigating the resource consumption features during query processing in DBMSs. To that end, we provide an in-depth anatomy and qualitatively analyze the power profile of typical queries in the TPC benchmarks. We perform extensive experiments on a physical testbed based on the Postg...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Zichen Xu, Yi-Cheng Tu, Xiaorui Wang
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 2010, Query Optimizer, Query Plans, Query Processing