Main Memory DBMS on Modern Processors, a Simulation Approach for Database Performance Characterization

Database applications are an important type of workloads that is very different from other types of application workloads such as SPEC benchmarks. In the past, much research has been devoted to evaluate performance characteristics of database workloads on various processor architectures. While most of the previous performance evaluations have been done using hardware counters, many recently developed full system simulators have provided another method for performance characterization. With the simulation paradigm, some architectural features of processors that were hard to examine using hardware counters are now accessible. However, results of simulations have to be validated against real machine executions to ensure their fidelity. This paper extend the Simics full-system simulator to measure performance of architectural features.