Showing papers by "Eugene J. Shekita published in 1989"

The EXODUS extensible DBMS project: an overview

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of EXODUS, an extensible database system project that is addressing data management problems posed by a variety of challenging new applications. The goal of the project is to facilitate the fast development of high-performance, application-specific database systems. EXODUS provides certain kernel facilities, including a versatile storage manager. In addition, it provides an architectural framework for building application-specific database systems; powerful tools to help automate the generation of such systems, including a rule-based query optimizer generator and a persistent programming language; and libraries of generic software components (e.g., access methods) that are likely to be useful for many application domains. We briefly describe each of the components of EXODUS in this paper, and we also describe a next-generation DBMS that we are now building using the EXODUS tools.

Storage management for objects in EXODUS

Abstract: In the 1970’s, the relational data model was the focus of much of the research in the database area. At this point, relational database technology is well-understood, a number of relational systems are commercially available, and they support the majority of business applications relatively well. One of the foremost database problems of the 1980’s is how to support classes of applications that are not well-served by relational systems. For example, computer-aided design systems, scientific and statistical applications, image and voice applications, and large, data-intensive AI applications all place demands on database systems that exceed the capabilities of relational systems. Such application classes differ from business applications in a variety of ways, including their data modeling needs, the types of operations of interest, and the storage structures and access methods required for their operations to be efficient.

Performance enhancement through replication in an object-oriented DBMS

Abstract: In this paper we describe how replicated data can be used to speedup query processing in an object-oriented database system. The general idea is to use replicated data to eliminate some of the functional joins that would otherwise be required for query processing. We refer to our technique for replicating data as field replication because it allows individual data fields to be selectively replicated. In the paper we describe how field replication can be specified at the data model level and we present storage-level mechanisms to efficiently support it. We also present an analytical cost model to give some feel for how beneficial field replication can be and the circumstances under which it breaks down. While field replication is a relatively simple notion, the analysis shows that it can provide significant performance gains in many situations.