Principal Investigator Samuel Madden
Co-investigator Michael Stonebraker
Project Website http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/
H-Store is an experimental main-memory, parallel database management system that is optimized for on-line transaction processing (OLTP) applications. It is a highly distributed, row-store-based relational database that runs on a cluster on shared-nothing, main memory executor nodes.
The H-Store project is a collaboration between MIT, Brown University, Yale University, and HP Labs.
The goal of the H-Store project is to investigate how recent architectural and application trends affect the performance of online transaction processing databases (such as those that back many e-commerce sites, banks and reservation systems), and to study what performance benefits would be possible with a complete redesign of OLTP systems in light of these trends. Our idea is to build a main memory system with a dramatically simplified concurrency control and recovery model, which the goal of executing many times as many transactions per second as existing databases that rely on logging, expensive locking based conccurency control, and disk based recovery. Our early results show that a simple prototype built from scratch using modern assumptions can outperform current commercial DBMS offerings by around a factor of 80 on OLTP workloads. We are currently working to build a full-featured system that demonstrates these performance wins in a more robust prototype.