Engineering high-performance database engines

Developing a database engine is both challenging and rewarding. Database engines are very complex software artifacts that have to scale to large data sizes and large hardware configurations, and developing such systems usually means choosing between different trade-offs at various points of development. This papers gives a survey over two different database engines, the disk-based SPARQL-processing engine RDF-3X, and the relational main-memory engine HyPer. It discusses the design choices that were made during development, and highlights optimization techniques that are important for both systems.