Optimizing OLAP cube processing on solid state drives

Abstract

Hardware technology has improved to a point where a solid state drive (SSD) can read faster than a traditional hard disk drive (HDD). This unique ability to retrieve data quickly combines perfectly with OLAP cube processing. In this paper, we study how to improve performance of OLAP cube processing on SSDs. The main novelty of our work is that we do not alter the internal subsystems of the DBMS. Instead, the DBMS treats the SSD as though it was a regular HDD. We propose optimizations for SQL queries to enhance their performance on SSDs. An experimental evaluation with the TPC-H database compares performance of our optimizations on SSDs and HDDs. We found that even though SSDs have slower write speeds than HDDs, their excellent read speed more than overcomes this limitation.