Design of a Reconfigurable Hybrid Database System

This paper proposes a design of a database system which accelerates the execution of database transactions by offloading database operators (e.g. joins, scans and sorting) in hardware algorithms executed on runtime reconfigurable computing platforms. Furthermore, a hybrid database system is described which exploits the strengths of the new reconfigurable hardware-based database system in combination with pre-existing technologies for main memory or disc resident database systems. Due to the parallel and pipelined design style of the hardware algorithms, the new database system offers a potential speedup over the traditional sequential execution on instruction stream processors. Moreover, data access times can be reduced by placing circuits on the reconfigurable fabric close to embedded memory which further allows for customizing high bandwidth memory interfaces. As a consequence of the accelerated execution speed, the new system has the potential to reliably meet constraints in real-time scenarios, to reduce the chance of lock contention and cache flushes, and to decrease the cost for concurrency control.