Improving Database Performance by Application-side Transaction Merging

TL;DR

This paper introduces TransactionMerger, a middleware that improves database transaction performance by merging similar and contending transactions, reducing redundant reads, and pre-computing effects, leading to significant throughput gains.

Contribution

It presents a novel middleware and static analysis tool for application-side transaction merging that enhances performance without violating isolation.

Findings

TPC-C throughput increased by up to 2.65X

Spree throughput increased by up to 3.52X

Effective transaction merging improves database performance

Abstract

This paper explores a new opportunity to improve the performance of transaction processing at the application side by merging structurely similar statements or transactions. Concretely, we re-write transactions to 1) merge similar statements using specific SQL semantics; 2) eliminate redundant reads; and 3) merge contending statements across transactions by pre-computing their aggregated effect. Following this idea, we present the design of TransactionMerger, a middleware to collect and merge transactions across different clients. We further present a static analysis tool to identify the merging opportunity without violating isolation as well as our experience of re-writing transactions in TPC-C and Spree, a popular real-world application. Our evaluation shows that such transaction merging can improve TPC-C throughput by up to 2.65X and Spree throughput by 3.52X.