Today, Micron announced that an open-source project they’d been working is ready for broader adoption. Micron is calling the project HSE for Heterogeneous-memory Storage Engine. HSE provides a modern back-end for databases and other storage applications.
Today, Micron announced that an open-source project they’d been working is ready for broader adoption. Micron is calling the project HSE for Heterogeneous-memory Storage Engine. HSE provides a modern back-end for databases and other storage applications.
Storage engines provide the back end that database applications use to interact with physical memory. Micron manufactures a lot of the physical memory products storage engines interact with, including DRAM, 3D XPoint technology, and SSDs. Micron is also currently trying to build up from manufacturing silicon hardware to provide vertically integrated and optimized systems. As part of this strategy, storage engines are a natural next step for them to apply their expertise with storage mediums to writing a storage engine optimized for working with modern, high-speed flash drives. Micron said they aimed to optimize HSE for solid-state drives (SSDs) and storage-class memory (SCM) while developing it. Internal testing at the company showed that their HSE is six times faster than current RocksDB storage engines while running on all-flash SSDs.
Performance was not the only metric Micron was aiming to improve with HSE. As the name, Heterogeneous-memory Storage Engine, implies, Micron also worked to transparently take advantage of multiple different types of memory being used with it. They specifically tested to make sure that mixing conventional NVMes and read optimized QLC SSDs provided good performance.
Like most modern open-source projects today, you can find Micron HSE on GitHub. In addition to the storage engine itself, Micron has also developed a version of MongoDB that uses it. The new MongoDB fork (version) can be found at the same GitHub link as the HSE source code. Many database applications are already supported by more than one storage engine, almost all of which are also open-source. Micron is pretty clearly hoping that now that they’ve shown how to integrate HSE with one DB, the community will port it over to support other DBs.
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