More context:
"Adhering to the “latch-free” philosophy, the Bw-tree delivered far better processor-cache performance than previous efforts.
“We had an ‘aha’ moment,” Lomet recalls, “when we realized that a single table that maps page identifiers to page locations would enable both latch-free page updating and log-structured page storage on flash memory. The other highlight, of course, was when we got back performance results that were stunningly good.”
The Bw-tree team first demonstrated its work in March 2011 during TechFest 2011, Microsoft Research’s annual showcase of cutting-edge projects. The Bw-tree performance results were dazzling enough to catch the interest of the SQL Server product group.
“When they learned about our performance numbers, that was when the Hekaton folks started paying serious attention to us,” researcher Justin Levandoski says. “We ran side-by-side tests of the Bw-tree against another latch-free technology they were using, which was based on ‘skiplists.’ The Bw-tree was faster by several factors. Shortly after that, we began engaging with the Hekaton team, mainly Diaconu and Zwilling.”
“A skiplist is often the first choice for implementing an ordered index, either latch-free or latch-based, because it is perceived to be more lightweight than a full B-tree implementation”, says Sudipta Sengupta, senior researcher in the Communication and Storage Systems Group. “An important contribution of our work is in dispelling this myth and establishing that latch-free B-trees can perform way better than latch-free skiplists. The Bw-tree also performs significantly better than a well-known latch-based B-tree implementation—BerkeleyDB—that is widely regarded in the community for its good performance.”
Performance of skiplists vs Btrees was already debunked 7 years ago, at least. So nice try M$ but as usual you're late to the party, not advancing the state of the art.
“We had an ‘aha’ moment,” Lomet recalls, “when we realized that a single table that maps page identifiers to page locations would enable both latch-free page updating and log-structured page storage on flash memory. The other highlight, of course, was when we got back performance results that were stunningly good.”
The Bw-tree team first demonstrated its work in March 2011 during TechFest 2011, Microsoft Research’s annual showcase of cutting-edge projects. The Bw-tree performance results were dazzling enough to catch the interest of the SQL Server product group.
“When they learned about our performance numbers, that was when the Hekaton folks started paying serious attention to us,” researcher Justin Levandoski says. “We ran side-by-side tests of the Bw-tree against another latch-free technology they were using, which was based on ‘skiplists.’ The Bw-tree was faster by several factors. Shortly after that, we began engaging with the Hekaton team, mainly Diaconu and Zwilling.”
“A skiplist is often the first choice for implementing an ordered index, either latch-free or latch-based, because it is perceived to be more lightweight than a full B-tree implementation”, says Sudipta Sengupta, senior researcher in the Communication and Storage Systems Group. “An important contribution of our work is in dispelling this myth and establishing that latch-free B-trees can perform way better than latch-free skiplists. The Bw-tree also performs significantly better than a well-known latch-based B-tree implementation—BerkeleyDB—that is widely regarded in the community for its good performance.”
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/hekaton-12...