# Accelerating Analytical Processing in MVCC using Fine-Granular High-Frequency Virtual Snapshotting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04284/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Heterogeneous Data-Centric Architectures for Modern Data-Intensive Applications: Case Studies in Machine Learning and Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14664/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient transactional management is a delicate task. As systems face transactions of inherently different types, ranging from point updates to long running analytical computations, it is hard to satisfy their individual requirements with a single processing component. Unfortunately, most systems nowadays rely on such a single component that implements its parallelism using multi-version concurrency control (MVCC). While MVCC parallelizes short-running OLTP transactions very well, it struggles in the presence of mixed workloads containing long-running scan-centric OLAP queries, as scans have to work their way through large amounts of versioned data. To overcome this problem, we propose a system, which reintroduces the concept of heterogeneous transaction processing: OLAP transactions are outsourced to run on separate (virtual) snapshots while OLTP transactions run on the most recent representation of the database. Inside both components, MVCC ensures a high degree of concurrency. The biggest challenge of such a heterogeneous approach is to generate the snapshots at a high frequency. Previous approaches heavily suffered from the tremendous cost of snapshot creation. In our system, we overcome the restrictions of the OS by introducing a custom system call vm_snapshot, that is hand-tailored to our precise needs: it allows fine-granular snapshot creation at very high frequencies, rendering the snapshot creation phase orders of magnitudes faster than state-of-the-art approaches. Our experimental evaluation on a heterogeneous workload based on TPC-H transactions and handcrafted OLTP transactions shows that our system enables significantly higher analytical transaction throughputs on mixed workloads than homogeneous approaches. In this sense, we introduce a system that accelerates Analytical processing by introducing custom Kernel functionalities: AnKerDB.