Buffer Management for Relational Database Systems

Abstract

Good buffer management is very important to the overall performance of a database management system. The buffer manager is the database component which manages data buffering. This paper describes the evolution of the buffer manager’s design in managing the allocation of database buffers to maximize performance. We start with a discussion of the memory hierarchy. We next describe the improvement of the search scheme and the buffer replacement algorithm used by the buffer manage. Finally, we discuss the evolution of asynchronous prefetch and deferred write, two important features that significantly enhance I/O throughput.