Spitfire: A Three-Tier Buffer Manager for Volatile and Non-Volatile Memory

The design of the buffer manager in database management systems (DBMSs) is influenced by the performance characteristics of volatile memory (i.e., DRAM) and non-volatile storage (e.g., SSD). The key design assumptions have been that the data must be migrated to DRAM for the DBMS to operate on it and that storage is orders of magnitude slower than DRAM. But the arrival of new non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies that are nearly as fast as DRAM invalidates these previous assumptions.