write-amplification

A detailed technical analysis of PostgreSQL's MVCC design, its known drawbacks like write amplification and vacuum overhead, and a comparison to alternatives that shows all database engines face similar fundamental trade-offs.

This paper proposes out-of-place write optimizations for database systems to fully leverage SSD performance, achieving 1.65-2.24x throughput improvement and 6.2-9.8x reduction in flash writes on OLTP benchmarks.