Section: New Results

Embedded data management

Participants : Nicolas Anciaux, Luc Bouganim, Yanli Guo, Lionel Le Folgoc, Philippe Pucheral, Shaoyi Yin.

Inspired by low cost economic models, this work draws the idea of a one-dollar database machine, with the objective to disseminate databases everywhere, up to the lightest smart objects. In contrast to traditional database machines relying on massively parallel architectures, the one-dollar database machine considers the cheapest form of computer available today: a microcontroller equipped with GBs size (external) Flash storage. Designing such a database machine is very challenging due to a combination of conflicting RAM and NAND Flash constraints. To tackle this challenge, this work proposes a new paradigm based on database serialization (managing all database structures in a pure sequential way) and stratification (restructuring them into strata when a scalability limit is reached). We show that a complete DBMS engine can be designed according to this paradigm and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach through a performance evaluation.

This work capitalizes on previous results related to the indexing of Flash resident data [39] and has also obvious connections with the more general study we are conducting on Flash-based data management (see Section 6.2 ). Partial elements of this solution have been demonstrated at [28] .