Tabular Placement of Relational Data on MEMS-based Storage Devices

摘要

Due to the advances in semiconductor manufacturing, the gap between main memory and secondary storage is constantly increasing. This becomes a significant performance bottleneck for Database Management Systems, which rely on secondary storage heavily to store large datasets. Recent advances in nanotechnology have led to the invention of alternative means for persistent storage. In particular, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) based storage technology has emerged as the leading candidate for next generation storage systems. In order to integrate MEMS-based storage into conventional computing platform, new techniques are needed for I/O scheduling and data placement. In the context of relational data, it has been observed that access to relations needs to be enabled in both row-wise as well as in column-wise fashions. In this paper, we exploit the physical characteristics of MEMS-based storage devices to develop a data placement scheme for relational data that enables retrieval in both row-wise and column-wise manner. We demonstrate that this data layout not only improves I/O utilization, but results in better cache performance.