Dual-Buffering Strategies in Object Bases

Authors:

Alfons Kemper

Donald Kossmann

Report:

1993, Technical Report MIP-9309, Universität Passau

Keywords:

• buffer management
• performance evaluation
• object-oriented database systems
• client-server architecture

Abstract:

In this work, we devise and evaluate control strategies for combining two potentially powerful buffer management techniques in object bases:

1. buffer pool segmentation with segment-specific replacement criteria and
2. dual buffering consisting of copying objects from pages into object buffers.

We distinguish two dimensions for exerting control on the buffer pool:

1. the copying time determines when objects are copied from their memory-resident home page and
2. the relocation time determines the occasion on which a (copied) object is transferred back into its home page.

Along both dimensions, we distinguish an eager and a lazy strategy. Our extensive experimental results indicate that a lazy object copying combined with an eager relocation strategy is almost always superior and significantly outperforms page-based buffering in most applications.