Alternative IO backends for Database Systems and SSDs

A recent MSc thesis project at ITU integrated xNVMe to DuckDB. DuckDB, like many popular database systems, rely on a syncronous IO backend and the POSIX filesystem interfaces for its ease of use. xNVMe, in contrast, allows a unified interface for alternative and more performant IO backends such as io-uring and spdk. Thus, integration of xNVMe into DuckDB offers interesting avenues for data analytics workloads run on DuckDB.

The existing integration of xNVMe to DuckDB is preliminary. It is a first step toward creating a more efficient IO path for data analysis. However, there is room for performance and code improvements, which is what we would like to explore in this project.

The outcome of this work can be upstreamed to DuckDB codebase, hence, have wider-scale impact. Furthermore, we collaborate with Samsung Research Denmark in this project, as they are among the maintainers of xNVMe.

If you are interested in data management systems, storage devices, benchmarking, and performance analysis in general, this project would be a great fit for you.

This project would be suitable as a standalone project, a research project with an MSc thesis followup, or BSc thesis.