Design and Implementation of SSD-Assisted Backup and Recovery for Database Systems

As flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) becomes more prevalent because of the rapid fall in price and the significant increase in capacity, customers expect better data services than traditional disk-based systems. However, the order of magnitude performance provided and new characteristics of flash require a rethinking of data services. For example, backup and recovery is an important service in a database system since it protects data against unexpected hardware and software failures. To provide backup and recovery, backup/recovery tools or backup/recovery methods by operating systems can be used. However, the tools perform time-consuming jobs, and the methods may negatively affect run-time performance during normal operation even though high-performance SSDs are used. To handle these issues, we propose an SSD-assisted backup/recovery scheme for database systems. Our scheme is to utilize the characteristics (e.g., out-of-place update) of flash-based SSD for backup/recovery operations. To this end, we exploit the resources (e.g., flash translation layer and DRAM cache with supercapacitors) inside SSD, and we call our SSD with new backup/recovery functionality BR-SSD. We design and implement the functionality in the Samsung enterprise-class SSD (i.e., SM843Tn) for more realistic systems. Furthermore, we exploit and integrate BR-SSDs into database systems (i.e., MySQL) in replication and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) environments, as well as a database system in a single BR-SSD. The experimental result demonstrates that our scheme provides fast backup and recovery but does not negatively affect the run-time performance during normal operation.