Modular data storage with Anvil

Abstract

Databases have achieved orders-of-magnitude performance improvements by changing the layout of stored data -- for instance, by arranging data in columns or compressing it before storage. These improvements have been implemented in monolithic new engines, however, making it difficult to experiment with feature combinations or extensions. We present Anvil, a modular and extensible toolkit for building database back ends. Anvil's storage modules, called dTables, have much finer granularity than prior work. For example, some dTables specialize in writing data, while others provide optimized read-only formats. This specialization makes both kinds of dTable simple to write and understand. Unifying dTables implement more comprehensive functionality by layering over other dTables -- for instance, building a read/write store from read-only tables and a writable journal, or building a general-purpose store from optimized special-purpose stores. The dTable design leads to a flexible system powerful enough to implement many database storage layouts. Our prototype implementation of Anvil performs up to 5.5 times faster than an existing B-tree-based database back end on conventional workloads, and can easily be customized for further gains on specific data and workloads.