An Alternative approach to Temporary Memory Management in Databases using Object Oriented Systems

Regardless of the supremacy of relational database management systems (RDBMS) in the databases, object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS) continue to play crucial role in the management of data. Generally, the complex data are often found in telecommunications, business, engineering and web based applications. The most common approach of accessing such data is navigation. However, the approach of navigational access of data has the potential of generating excessive disk IO because objects in the path of navigation may be placed in different disk pages. Excessive disk IO is becoming increasingly undesirable because disk IO performance improves at only 5-8% per year whereas CPU performance doubles approximately every 18 months. Thus disk IO is likely to be a bottleneck in an increasing number of OODB applications. This paper focuses on reducing disk IO effects to improve OODBMS performance. In database environment effective buffer management of the main memory is the key in increasing efficiency through reducing the disk IO bottleneck in OODBMSs. There has been much existing work, namely in the areas of: static clustering; dynamic clustering; buffer replacement; and pre-fetching. All of these techniques can be used together in a complimentary manner. Most existing research has focused on finding the best solution for each area with little regard on how solutions from the different areas affect each other. We believe synergy exists between the areas, and that exploiting the synergy leads to the best overall solution. This paper focuses on exploring whether synergistic techniques are both feasible to implement and outperform their non-synergistic counterparts.