Space-efficient multiversion index scheme for PCM-based embedded database systems

Embedded database systems are widely adopted in various control and motoring systems, e.g., cyber-physical systems (CPSes). To support the functionality to access the historical data, a multiversion index is adopted to maintain multiple versions of data items and their index information. However, CPSes are usually battery-powered embedded systems that have limited energy, computing power, and storage space. In this work, we consider the systems with phase-change memory (PCM) as their storage due to its non-volatility and low energy consumption. In order to resolve the problem of the limited storage space and the fact that existing multiversion index designs are lack of space efficiency, we propose a space-efficient multiversion index scheme to enhance the space utilization and access performance of embedded multiversion database systems on PCM by utilizing the byte-addressability and write asymmetry of PCM. A series of experiments was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves very high space utilization and has good performance on serving update transactions and range queries.