Accelerating In-memory Database Functionality with FPGAs

In this article, we present a hardware offload of part of the delta merge process used in In-Memory Databases (IMDBs). The delta merge process is fundamental in maintaining high transactional throughput for IMDBs. Improving the efficiency of the delta merge process allows running it more frequently, which will improve the performance for transactional throughout for an IMDB. Our FPGA design supports more use cases than existing research, and was demonstrated to be faster than the existing implementation in an enterprise database, offering speedups of between 4 \(\times\) and 100 \(\times\) compared to the CPU optimised implementation, depending on the properties of the database columns.