We are at an exciting point in the evolution of memory technology. Device manufacturers have created a new non-volatile memory (NVM) technology that can serve as both system memory and storage. NVM supports fast reads and writes similar to volatile memory, but all writes to it are persistent like a solid-state disk. The advent of NVM invalidates decades of design decisions that are deeply embedded in today's database management systems (DBMSs). These systems are unable to take full advantage of NVM because their internal architectures are predicated on the assumption that memory is volatile. With NVM, many of the components of today's DBMSs are unnecessary and will degrade the performance of data-intensive applications. Thus, the best way to resolve these shortcomings is by designing a new system explicitly tailored for NVM. In this talk, I will discuss how the impact of NVM spans across all the layers of the DBMS.

Joy Arulraj has been an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech since 2018. A principal theme in his research is the development of systems for accelerating and simplifying data analytics — making it easy for users to leverage and make sense of their large and complex datasets. Before starting at Georgia Tech, Joy received his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University. His doctoral research on non-volatile memory database systems has been recognized with the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2019. He received a Class of 1969 Teaching Fellowship in 2019 for his efforts toward the development of a new series of courses on implementing database systems. His research is being supported by NSF, Intel, and Alibaba.