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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it would be possible to put InnoDB to a kernel mode filesystem driver to create a new database filesystem. (BeFS/WinFS-style)

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Amazon Aurora does something similar in the sense that it decouples InnoDB functions including buffer cache and storage access from the overlying MySQL engine. The decoupled InnoDB lives on separate VM(s) and includes optimized data replication to support DBMS high availability. For example, with Aurora you can failover a large DBMS in seconds to a new site and have it come up with a heated buffer cache since that replicates too.

This approach makes sense for Aurora because it leverages cloud storage to provide data high availability across availability zones. Just putting InnoDB in a file system seems less interesting unless you add features that are strikingly different from what it does now.

See http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.pd... for a full description.

Sounds overly complicated and obscure.

The results are a massive gain in performance, availability, and durability, that seems worth added complexity.

It's worth reading the paper. The Aurora team claims 10x plus boosts in transaction throughput and extremely fast recovery times. These are important benefits.

Should be relatively easy to try it out as a fuse filesystem.

Great, I'll expect a progress report from you in the morning.

Relatively easy does not mean little work.

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