Chapter 11: Storage and File Structure

Database System Concepts, 5th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Chapter 11: Storage and File Structure

● Overview of Physical Storage Media

● Magnetic Disks
● RAID
● Tertiary Storage
● Storage Access
● File Organization
● Organization of Records in Files
● Data-Dictionary Storage
● Storage Structures for Object-Oriented Databases

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Classification of Physical Storage Media

● Speed with which data can be accessed

● Cost per unit of data
● Reliability
● data loss on power failure or system crash
● physical failure of the storage device
● Can differentiate storage into:
● volatile storage: loses contents when power is switched off
● non-volatile storage:
4 Contents persist even when power is switched off.
4 Includes secondary and tertiary storage, as well as batter-
backed up main-memory.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.3 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Physical Storage Media

● Cache – fastest and most costly form of storage; volatile; managed by the
computer system hardware.
● Main memory:
● fast access (10s to 100s of nanoseconds; 1 nanosecond = 10–9
seconds)
● generally too small (or too expensive) to store the entire database
4 capacities of up to a few Gigabytes widely used currently
4 Capacities have gone up and per-byte costs have decreased
steadily and rapidly (roughly factor of 2 every 2 to 3 years)
● Volatile — contents of main memory are usually lost if a power
failure or system crash occurs.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Physical Storage Media (Cont.)
● Flash memory
● Data survives power failure
● Data can be written at a location only once, but location can be erased
and written to again
4 Can support only a limited number (10K – 1M) of write/erase
cycles.
4 Erasing of memory has to be done to an entire bank of memory
● Reads are roughly as fast as main memory
● But writes are slow (few microseconds), erase is slower
● Cost per unit of storage roughly similar to main memory
● Widely used in embedded devices such as digital cameras
● Is a type of EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only
Memory)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Physical Storage Media (Cont.)

● Magnetic-disk
● Data is stored on spinning disk, and read/written magnetically
● Primary medium for the long-term storage of data; typically stores entire
database.
● Data must be moved from disk to main memory for access, and written back for
storage
4 Much slower access than main memory (more on this later)
● direct-access – possible to read data on disk in any order, unlike magnetic tape
● Capacities range up to roughly 400 GB currently
4 Much larger capacity and cost/byte than main memory/flash memory
4 Growing constantly and rapidly with technology improvements (factor of 2 to
3 every 2 years)
● Survives power failures and system crashes
4 disk failure can destroy data, but is rare

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.6 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Physical Storage Media (Cont.)
● Optical storage
● non-volatile, data is read optically from a spinning disk using a
laser
● CD-ROM (640 MB) and DVD (4.7 to 17 GB) most popular forms
● Write-one, read-many (WORM) optical disks used for archival
storage (CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R)
● Multiple write versions also available (CD-RW, DVD-RW,
DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM)
● Reads and writes are slower than with magnetic disk
● Juke-box systems, with large numbers of removable disks, a few
drives, and a mechanism for automatic loading/unloading of disks
available for storing large volumes of data

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Physical Storage Media (Cont.)
● Tape storage
● non-volatile, used primarily for backup (to recover from disk
failure), and for archival data
● sequential-access – much slower than disk
● very high capacity (40 to 300 GB tapes available)
● tape can be removed from drive ⇒ storage costs much cheaper than
disk, but drives are expensive
● Tape jukeboxes available for storing massive amounts of data
4 hundreds of terabytes (1 terabyte = 109 bytes) to even a petabyte
(1 petabyte = 1012 bytes)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.8 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Storage Hierarchy

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.9 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Storage Hierarchy (Cont.)

● primary storage: Fastest media but volatile (cache, main memory).

● secondary storage: next level in hierarchy, non-volatile, moderately
fast access time
● also called on-line storage
● E.g. flash memory, magnetic disks
● tertiary storage: lowest level in hierarchy, non-volatile, slow access
time
● also called off-line storage
● E.g. magnetic tape, optical storage

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Magnetic Hard Disk Mechanism

NOTE: Diagram is schematic, and simplifies the structure of actual disk drives

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 Magnetic Disks
● Read-write head
● Positioned very close to the platter surface (almost touching it)
● Reads or writes magnetically encoded information.
● Surface of platter divided into circular tracks
● Over 50K-100K tracks per platter on typical hard disks
● Each track is divided into sectors.
● A sector is the smallest unit of data that can be read or written.
● Sector size typically 512 bytes
● Typical sectors per track: 500 (on inner tracks) to 1000 (on outer tracks)
● To read/write a sector
● disk arm swings to position head on right track
● platter spins continually; data is read/written as sector passes under head
● Head-disk assemblies
● multiple disk platters on a single spindle (1 to 5 usually)
● one head per platter, mounted on a common arm.
● Cylinder i consists of ith track of all the platters

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.12 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Magnetic Disks (Cont.)

● Earlier generation disks were susceptible to head-crashes

● Surface of earlier generation disks had metal-oxide coatings which would
disintegrate on head crash and damage all data on disk
● Current generation disks are less susceptible to such disastrous failures,
although individual sectors may get corrupted
● Disk controller – interfaces between the computer system and the disk drive
hardware.
● accepts high-level commands to read or write a sector
● initiates actions such as moving the disk arm to the right track and actually
reading or writing the data
● Computes and attaches checksums to each sector to verify that data is read
back correctly
4 If data is corrupted, with very high probability stored checksum won’t
match recomputed checksum
● Ensures successful writing by reading back sector after writing it
● Performs remapping of bad sectors

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.13 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Disk Subsystem

● Multiple disks connected to a computer system through a controller

● Controllers functionality (checksum, bad sector remapping) often carried out
by individual disks; reduces load on controller
● Disk interface standards families
● ATA (AT adaptor) range of standards
● SATA (Serial ATA)
● SCSI (Small Computer System Interconnect) range of standards
● Several variants of each standard (different speeds and capabilities)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.14 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Performance Measures of Disks
● Access time – the time it takes from when a read or write request is issued to when
data transfer begins. Consists of:
● Seek time – time it takes to reposition the arm over the correct track.
4 Average seek time is 1/2 the worst case seek time.
– Would be 1/3 if all tracks had the same number of sectors, and we ignore
the time to start and stop arm movement
4 4 to 10 milliseconds on typical disks
● Rotational latency – time it takes for the sector to be accessed to appear under
the head.
4 Average latency is 1/2 of the worst case latency.
4 4 to 11 milliseconds on typical disks (5400 to 15000 r.p.m.)
● Data-transfer rate – the rate at which data can be retrieved from or stored to the disk.
● 25 to 100 MB per second max rate, lower for inner tracks
● Multiple disks may share a controller, so rate that controller can handle is also
important
4 E.g. ATA-5: 66 MB/sec, SATA: 150 MB/sec, Ultra 320 SCSI: 320 MB/s
4 Fiber Channel (FC2Gb): 256 MB/s

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.15 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Performance Measures (Cont.)

● Mean time to failure (MTTF) – the average time the disk is expected to
run continuously without any failure.
● Typically 3 to 5 years
● Probability of failure of new disks is quite low, corresponding to a
“theoretical MTTF” of 500,000 to 1,200,000 hours for a new disk
4 E.g., an MTTF of 1,200,000 hours for a new disk means that given
1000 relatively new disks, on an average one will fail every 1200
hours
● MTTF decreases as disk ages

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.16 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Optimization of Disk-Block Access
● Block – a contiguous sequence of sectors from a single track
● data is transferred between disk and main memory in blocks
● sizes range from 512 bytes to several kilobytes
4 Smaller blocks: more transfers from disk
4 Larger blocks: more space wasted due to partially filled blocks
4 Typical block sizes today range from 4 to 16 kilobytes
● Disk-arm-scheduling algorithms order pending accesses to tracks so that
disk arm movement is minimized
● elevator algorithm : move disk arm in one direction (from outer to inner
tracks or vice versa), processing next request in that direction, till no
more requests in that direction, then reverse direction and repeat

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 Optimization of Disk Block Access (Cont.)

● File organization – optimize block access time by organizing the blocks

to correspond to how data will be accessed
● E.g. Store related information on the same or nearby cylinders.
● Files may get fragmented over time
4 E.g. if data is inserted to/deleted from the file
4 Or free blocks on disk are scattered, and newly created file has its
blocks scattered over the disk
4 Sequential access to a fragmented file results in increased disk arm
movement
● Some systems have utilities to defragment the file system, in order to
speed up file access

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.18 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Optimization of Disk Block Access (Cont.)

● Nonvolatile write buffers speed up disk writes by writing blocks to a non-volatile RAM
buffer immediately
● Non-volatile RAM: battery backed up RAM or flash memory
4 Even if power fails, the data is safe and will be written to disk when power returns
● Controller then writes to disk whenever the disk has no other requests or request has
been pending for some time
● Database operations that require data to be safely stored before continuing can continue
without waiting for data to be written to disk
● Writes can be reordered to minimize disk arm movement
● Log disk – a disk devoted to writing a sequential log of block updates
● Used exactly like nonvolatile RAM
4 Write to log disk is very fast since no seeks are required
4 No need for special hardware (NV-RAM)
● File systems typically reorder writes to disk to improve performance
● Journaling file systems write data in safe order to NV-RAM or log disk
● Reordering without journaling: risk of corruption of file system data

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.19 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 RAID
● RAID: Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks
● disk organization techniques that manage a large numbers of disks, providing
a view of a single disk of
4 high capacity and high speed by using multiple disks in parallel, and
4 high reliability by storing data redundantly, so that data can be recovered
even if a disk fails
● The chance that some disk out of a set of N disks will fail is much higher than the
chance that a specific single disk will fail.
● E.g., a system with 100 disks, each with MTTF of 100,000 hours (approx.
11 years), will have a system MTTF of 1000 hours (approx. 41 days)
● Techniques for using redundancy to avoid data loss are critical with large
numbers of disks
● Originally a cost-effective alternative to large, expensive disks
● I in RAID originally stood for ``inexpensive’’
● Today RAIDs are used for their higher reliability and bandwidth.
4 The “I” is interpreted as independent

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.20 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Improvement of Reliability via Redundancy

● Redundancy – store extra information that can be used to rebuild information lost
in a disk failure
● E.g., Mirroring (or shadowing)
● Duplicate every disk. Logical disk consists of two physical disks.
● Every write is carried out on both disks
4 Reads can take place from either disk
● If one disk in a pair fails, data still available in the other
4 Data loss would occur only if a disk fails, and its mirror disk also fails
before the system is repaired
– Probability of combined event is very small
» Except for dependent failure modes such as fire or building
collapse or electrical power surges
● Mean time to data loss depends on mean time to failure,
and mean time to repair
● E.g. MTTF of 100,000 hours, mean time to repair of 10 hours gives mean
time to data loss of 500*106 hours (or 57,000 years) for a mirrored pair of
disks (ignoring dependent failure modes)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.21 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Improvement in Performance via Parallelism

● Two main goals of parallelism in a disk system:

1. Load balance multiple small accesses to increase throughput
2. Parallelize large accesses to reduce response time.
● Improve transfer rate by striping data across multiple disks.
● Bit-level striping – split the bits of each byte across multiple disks
● In an array of eight disks, write bit i of each byte to disk i.
● Each access can read data at eight times the rate of a single disk.
● But seek/access time worse than for a single disk
4 Bit level striping is not used much any more
● Block-level striping – with n disks, block i of a file goes to disk (i mod n) + 1
● Requests for different blocks can run in parallel if the blocks reside on different
disks
● A request for a long sequence of blocks can utilize all disks in parallel

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.22 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 RAID Levels
● Schemes to provide redundancy at lower cost by using disk striping combined
with parity bits
● Different RAID organizations, or RAID levels, have differing cost,
performance and reliability characteristics

● RAID Level 0: Block striping; non-redundant.

● Used in high-performance applications where data lose is not critical.

● RAID Level 1: Mirrored disks with block striping

● Offers best write performance.
● Popular for applications such as storing log files in a database system.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.23 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 RAID Levels (Cont.)
● RAID Level 2: Memory-Style Error-Correcting-Codes (ECC) with bit striping.
● RAID Level 3: Bit-Interleaved Parity
● a single parity bit is enough for error correction, not just detection, since we
know which disk has failed
4 When writing data, corresponding parity bits must also be computed and
written to a parity bit disk
4 To recover data in a damaged disk, compute XOR of bits from other disks
(including parity bit disk)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.24 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 RAID Levels (Cont.)
● RAID Level 3 (Cont.)
● Faster data transfer than with a single disk, but fewer I/Os per second since
every disk has to participate in every I/O.
● Subsumes Level 2 (provides all its benefits, at lower cost).
● RAID Level 4: Block-Interleaved Parity; uses block-level striping, and keeps a
parity block on a separate disk for corresponding blocks from N other disks.
● When writing data block, corresponding block of parity bits must also be
computed and written to parity disk
● To find value of a damaged block, compute XOR of bits from corresponding
blocks (including parity block) from other disks.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.25 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 RAID Levels (Cont.)
● RAID Level 4 (Cont.)
● Provides higher I/O rates for independent block reads than Level 3
4 block read goes to a single disk, so blocks stored on different disks can
be read in parallel
● Provides high transfer rates for reads of multiple blocks than no-striping
● Before writing a block, parity data must be computed
4 Can be done by using old parity block, old value of current block and
new value of current block (2 block reads + 2 block writes)
4 Or by recomputing the parity value using the new values of blocks
corresponding to the parity block
– More efficient for writing large amounts of data sequentially
● Parity block becomes a bottleneck for independent block writes since every
block write also writes to parity disk

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.26 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 RAID Levels (Cont.)
● RAID Level 5: Block-Interleaved Distributed Parity; partitions data and parity
among all N + 1 disks, rather than storing data in N disks and parity in 1 disk.
● E.g., with 5 disks, parity block for nth set of blocks is stored on disk (n mod 5) +
1, with the data blocks stored on the other 4 disks.

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 RAID Levels (Cont.)
● RAID Level 5 (Cont.)
● Higher I/O rates than Level 4.
4 Block writes occur in parallel if the blocks and their parity blocks are
on different disks.
● Subsumes Level 4: provides same benefits, but avoids bottleneck of
parity disk.
● RAID Level 6: P+Q Redundancy scheme; similar to Level 5, but stores extra
redundant information to guard against multiple disk failures.
● Better reliability than Level 5 at a higher cost; not used as widely.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.28 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Choice of RAID Level
● Factors in choosing RAID level
● Monetary cost
● Performance: Number of I/O operations per second, and bandwidth during
normal operation
● Performance during failure
● Performance during rebuild of failed disk
4 Including time taken to rebuild failed disk
● RAID 0 is used only when data safety is not important
● E.g. data can be recovered quickly from other sources
● Level 2 and 4 never used since they are subsumed by 3 and 5
● Level 3 is not used anymore since bit-striping forces single block reads to access
all disks, wasting disk arm movement, which block striping (level 5) avoids
● Level 6 is rarely used since levels 1 and 5 offer adequate safety for almost all
applications
● So competition is between 1 and 5 only

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.29 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Choice of RAID Level (Cont.)
● Level 1 provides much better write performance than level 5
● Level 5 requires at least 2 block reads and 2 block writes to write a single block,
whereas Level 1 only requires 2 block writes
● Level 1 preferred for high update environments such as log disks
● Level 1 had higher storage cost than level 5
● disk drive capacities increasing rapidly (50%/year) whereas disk access times
have decreased much less (x 3 in 10 years)
● I/O requirements have increased greatly, e.g. for Web servers
● When enough disks have been bought to satisfy required rate of I/O, they often
have spare storage capacity
4 so there is often no extra monetary cost for Level 1!
● Level 5 is preferred for applications with low update rate,
and large amounts of data
● Level 1 is preferred for all other applications

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.30 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Issues

● Software RAID: RAID implementations done entirely in software, with no

special hardware support
● Hardware RAID: RAID implementations with special hardware
● Use non-volatile RAM to record writes that are being executed
● Beware: power failure during write can result in corrupted disk
4 E.g. failure after writing one block but before writing the second in a
mirrored system
4 Such corrupted data must be detected when power is restored
– Recovery from corruption is similar to recovery from failed disk
– NV-RAM helps to efficiently detected potentially corrupted blocks
» Otherwise all blocks of disk must be read and compared with
mirror/parity block

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.31 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Issues (Cont.)
● Hot swapping: replacement of disk while system is running, without
power down
● Supported by some hardware RAID systems,
● reduces time to recovery, and improves availability greatly
● Many systems maintain spare disks which are kept online, and used as
replacements for failed disks immediately on detection of failure
● Reduces time to recovery greatly
● Many hardware RAID systems ensure that a single point of failure will
not stop the functioning of the system by using
● Redundant power supplies with battery backup
● Multiple controllers and multiple interconnections to guard against
controller/interconnection failures

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.32 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Optical Disks
● Compact disk-read only memory (CD-ROM)
● Removable disks, 640 MB per disk
● Seek time about 100 msec (optical read head is heavier and slower)
● Higher latency (3000 RPM) and lower data-transfer rates (3-6 MB/s)
compared to magnetic disks
● Digital Video Disk (DVD)
● DVD-5 holds 4.7 GB , and DVD-9 holds 8.5 GB
● DVD-10 and DVD-18 are double sided formats with capacities of 9.4 GB and
17 GB
● Slow seek time, for same reasons as CD-ROM
● Record once versions (CD-R and DVD-R) are popular
● data can only be written once, and cannot be erased.
● high capacity and long lifetime; used for archival storage
● Multi-write versions (CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM) also
available

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 Magnetic Tapes
● Hold large volumes of data and provide high transfer rates
● Few GB for DAT (Digital Audio Tape) format, 10-40 GB with DLT
(Digital Linear Tape) format, 100 GB+ with Ultrium format, and 330 GB
with Ampex helical scan format
● Transfer rates from few to 10s of MB/s
● Currently the cheapest storage medium
● Tapes are cheap, but cost of drives is very high
● Very slow access time in comparison to magnetic disks and optical disks
● limited to sequential access.
● Some formats (Accelis) provide faster seek (10s of seconds) at cost of
lower capacity
● Used mainly for backup, for storage of infrequently used information, and as
an off-line medium for transferring information from one system to another.
● Tape jukeboxes used for very large capacity storage
● (terabyte (1012 bytes) to petabye (1015 bytes)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.34 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Storage Access

● A database file is partitioned into fixed-length storage units called

blocks. Blocks are units of both storage allocation and data transfer.
● Database system seeks to minimize the number of block transfers
between the disk and memory. We can reduce the number of disk
accesses by keeping as many blocks as possible in main memory.
● Buffer – portion of main memory available to store copies of disk
blocks.
● Buffer manager – subsystem responsible for allocating buffer space in
main memory.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.35 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Buffer Manager
● Programs call on the buffer manager when they need a block from disk.
1. If the block is already in the buffer, buffer manager returns the
address of the block in main memory
2. If the block is not in the buffer, the buffer manager
1. Allocates space in the buffer for the block
1. Replacing (throwing out) some other block, if required, to
make space for the new block.
2. Replaced block written back to disk only if it was modified
since the most recent time that it was written to/fetched from
the disk.
2. Reads the block from the disk to the buffer, and returns the
address of the block in main memory to requester.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.36 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Buffer-Replacement Policies
● Most operating systems replace the block least recently used (LRU
strategy)
● Idea behind LRU – use past pattern of block references as a predictor of
future references
● Queries have well-defined access patterns (such as sequential scans), and a
database system can use the information in a user’s query to predict future
references
● LRU can be a bad strategy for certain access patterns involving
repeated scans of data
4 For example: when computing the join of 2 relations r and s by a
nested loops
for each tuple tr of r do
for each tuple ts of s do
if the tuples tr and ts match …
● Mixed strategy with hints on replacement strategy provided
by the query optimizer is preferable

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.37 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Buffer-Replacement Policies (Cont.)
● Pinned block – memory block that is not allowed to be written back to
disk.
● Toss-immediate strategy – frees the space occupied by a block as soon
as the final tuple of that block has been processed
● Most recently used (MRU) strategy – system must pin the block
currently being processed. After the final tuple of that block has been
processed, the block is unpinned, and it becomes the most recently used
block.
● Buffer manager can use statistical information regarding the probability
that a request will reference a particular relation
● E.g., the data dictionary is frequently accessed. Heuristic: keep
data-dictionary blocks in main memory buffer
● Buffer managers also support forced output of blocks for the purpose of
recovery (more in Chapter 17)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.38 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 File Organization

● The database is stored as a collection of files. Each file is a sequence of

records. A record is a sequence of fields.
● One approach:
● assume record size is fixed
● each file has records of one particular type only
● different files are used for different relations
This case is easiest to implement; will consider variable length records
later.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.39 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Fixed-Length Records
● Simple approach:
● Store record i starting from byte n * (i – 1), where n is the size of each
record.
● Record access is simple but records may cross blocks
4 Modification: do not allow records to cross block boundaries

● Deletion of record i:
alternatives:
● move records i + 1, . . ., n
to i, . . . , n – 1
● move record n to i
● do not move records, but
link all free records on a
free list

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.40 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Free Lists
● Store the address of the first deleted record in the file header.
● Use this first record to store the address of the second deleted record, and so
on
● Can think of these stored addresses as pointers since they “point” to the
location of a record.
● More space efficient representation: reuse space for normal attributes of free
records to store pointers. (No pointers stored in in-use records.)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.41 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Variable-Length Records

● Variable-length records arise in database systems in several ways:

● Storage of multiple record types in a file.
● Record types that allow variable lengths for one or more fields.
● Record types that allow repeating fields (used in some older data
models).

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.42 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Variable-Length Records: Slotted Page Structure

● Slotted page header contains:

● number of record entries
● end of free space in the block
● location and size of each record
● Records can be moved around within a page to keep them contiguous with
no empty space between them; entry in the header must be updated.
● Pointers should not point directly to record — instead they should point to
the entry for the record in header.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.43 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Organization of Records in Files

● Heap – a record can be placed anywhere in the file where there is

space
● Sequential – store records in sequential order, based on the value of
the search key of each record
● Hashing – a hash function computed on some attribute of each
record; the result specifies in which block of the file the record should
be placed
● Records of each relation may be stored in a separate file. In a
multitable clustering file organization records of several different
relations can be stored in the same file
● Motivation: store related records on the same block to minimize
I/O

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.44 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Sequential File Organization
● Suitable for applications that require sequential processing of the
entire file
● The records in the file are ordered by a search-key

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.45 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Sequential File Organization (Cont.)
● Deletion – use pointer chains
● Insertion –locate the position where the record is to be inserted
● if there is free space insert there
● if no free space, insert the record in an overflow block
● In either case, pointer chain must be updated
● Need to reorganize the file
from time to time to restore
sequential order

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.46 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Multitable Clustering File Organization
Store several relations in one file using a multitable clustering file
organization

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.47 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Multitable Clustering File Organization (cont.)

Multitable clustering organization of customer and depositor:

● good for queries involving depositor customer, and for queries involving one
single customer and his accounts
● bad for queries involving only customer
● results in variable size records
● Can add pointer chains to link records of a particular relation

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.48 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Data Dictionary Storage
Data dictionary (also called system catalog) stores metadata; that is,
data about data, such as
● Information about relations
● names of relations
● names and types of attributes of each relation
● names and definitions of views
● integrity constraints
● User and accounting information, including passwords
● Statistical and descriptive data
● number of tuples in each relation
● Physical file organization information
● How relation is stored (sequential/hash/…)
● Physical location of relation
● Information about indices (Chapter 12)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.49 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Data Dictionary Storage (Cont.)
● Catalog structure
● Relational representation on disk
● specialized data structures designed for efficient access, in memory
● A possible catalog representation:

Relation_metadata = (relation_name, number_of_attributes,

storage_organization, location)
Attribute_metadata = (attribute_name, relation_name, domain_type,
position, length)
User_metadata = (user_name, encrypted_password, group)
Index_metadata = (index_name, relation_name, index_type,
index_attributes)
View_metadata = (view_name, definition)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.50 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
End of Chapter 11

Database System Concepts, 5th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Record Representation
● Records with fixed length fields are easy to represent
● Similar to records (structs) in programming languages
● Extensions to represent null values
4 E.g. a bitmap indicating which attributes are null
● Variable length fields can be represented by a pair
(offset,length)
where offset is the location within the record and length is field length.
● All fields start at predefined location, but extra indirection required for
variable length fields

A-102 10 400 Perryridge

account_number balance
branch_name

Example record structure of account record

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.52 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 File Containing account Records

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.53 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 File of Figure 11.6, with Record 2 Deleted and All
Records Moved

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.54 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 File of Figure 11.6, With Record 2 deleted and Final
Record Moved

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.55 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Byte-String Representation of Variable-Length
Records

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.56 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Clustering File Structure

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.57 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Clustering File Structure With Pointer Chains

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.58 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 The depositor Relation

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.59 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 The customer Relation

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.60 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Clustering File Structure

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.61 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.62 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Figure 11.4

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.63 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Figure 11.7

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.64 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Figure 11.8

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.65 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Figure 11.100

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.66 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Figure 11.20

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.67 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Byte-String Representation of Variable-Length Records

Byte string representation

Attach an end-of-record (⊥) control character to the end of each record
Difficulty with deletion
Difficulty with growth

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.68 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Fixed-Length Representation
● Use one or more fixed length records:
● reserved space
● pointers
● Reserved space – can use fixed-length records of a known maximum
length; unused space in shorter records filled with a null or end-of-record
symbol.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.69 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Pointer Method

● Pointer method
● A variable-length record is represented by a list of fixed-length
records, chained together via pointers.
● Can be used even if the maximum record length is not known

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.70 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Pointer Method (Cont.)
● Disadvantage to pointer structure; space is wasted in all records
except the first in a a chain.
● Solution is to allow two kinds of block in file:
● Anchor block – contains the first records of chain
● Overflow block – contains records other than those that are the
first records of chairs.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.71 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Mapping of Objects to Files
● Mapping objects to files is similar to mapping tuples to files in a relational
system; object data can be stored using file structures.
● Objects in O-O databases may lack uniformity and may be very large; such
objects have to managed differently from records in a relational system.
● Set fields with a small number of elements may be implemented using data
structures such as linked lists.
● Set fields with a larger number of elements may be implemented as
separate relations in the database.
● Set fields can also be eliminated at the storage level by normalization.
4 Similar to conversion of multivalued attributes of E-R diagrams to
relations

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.72 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Mapping of Objects to Files (Cont.)
● Objects are identified by an object identifier (OID); the storage system needs
a mechanism to locate an object given its OID (this action is called
dereferencing).
● logical identifiers do not directly specify an object’s physical location;
must maintain an index that maps an OID to the object’s actual location.
● physical identifiers encode the location of the object so the object can be
found directly. Physical OIDs typically have the following parts:
1. a volume or file identifier
2. a page identifier within the volume or file
3. an offset within the page

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.73 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Management of Persistent Pointers
● Physical OIDs may be a unique identifier. This identifier is stored in
the object also and is used to detect references via dangling pointers.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.74 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Management of Persistent Pointers
(Cont.)
● Implement persistent pointers using OIDs; persistent pointers are
substantially longer than are in-memory pointers
● Pointer swizzling cuts down on cost of locating persistent objects already
in-memory.
● Software swizzling (swizzling on pointer deference)
● When a persistent pointer is first dereferenced, the pointer is swizzled
(replaced by an in-memory pointer) after the object is located in
memory.
● Subsequent dereferences of of the same pointer become cheap.
● The physical location of an object in memory must not change if
swizzled pointers pont to it; the solution is to pin pages in memory
● When an object is written back to disk, any swizzled pointers it contains
need to be unswizzled.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.75 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Swizzling
● With hardware swizzling, persistent pointers in objects need the same
amount of space as in-memory pointers — extra storage external to the
object is used to store rest of pointer information.
● Uses virtual memory translation mechanism to efficiently and
transparently convert between persistent pointers and in-memory
pointers.
● All persistent pointers in a page are swizzled when the page is first read
in.
● thus programmers have to work with just one type of pointer, i.e.,
in-memory pointer.
● some of the swizzled pointers may point to virtual memory
addresses that are currently not allocated any real memory (and do
not contain valid data)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.76 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Swizzling
● Persistent pointer is conceptually split into two parts: a page identifier, and
an offset within the page.
● The page identifier in a pointer is a short indirect pointer: Each page has
a translation table that provides a mapping from the short page identifiers
to full database page identifiers.
● Translation table for a page is small (at most 1024 pointers in a 4096 byte
page with 4 byte pointer)
● Multiple pointers in page to the same page share same entry in the
translation table.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.77 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Swizzling (Cont.)

● Page image before swizzling (page located on disk)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.78 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Swizzling (Cont.)
● When system loads a page into memory the persistent pointers in the page are
swizzled as described below
1. Persistent pointers in each object in the page are located using object type
information
2. For each persistent pointer (pi, oi) find its full page ID Pi

1. If P does not already have a virtual memory page allocated to it, allocate a
i
virtual memory page to Pi and read-protect the page
4 Note: there need not be any physical space (whether in memory or on
disk swap-space) allocated for the virtual memory page at this point.
Space can be allocated later if (and when) Pi is accessed. In this case
read-protection is not required.
4 Accessing a memory location in the page in the will result in a
segmentation violation, which is handled as described later

2. Let v be the virtual page allocated to Pi (either earlier or above)

i
3. Replace (pi, oi) by (vi, oi)
Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.79 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Swizzling (Cont.)
● When an in-memory pointer is dereferenced, if the operating system
detects the page it points to has not yet been allocated storage, or is
read-protected, a segmentation violation occurs.
● The mmap() call in Unix is used to specify a function to be invoked on
segmentation violation
● The function does the following when it is invoked
1. Allocate storage (swap-space) for the page containing the referenced
address, if storage has not been allocated earlier. Turn off
read-protection
2. Read in the page from disk
3. Perform pointer swizzling for each persistent pointer in the page, as
described earlier

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.80 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Swizzling (Cont.)

Page image after swizzling

● Page with short page identifier 2395 was allocated address 5001.
Observe change in pointers and translation table.
● Page with short page identifier 4867 has been allocated address 4867.
No change in pointer and translation table.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.81 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Hardware Swizzling (Cont.)
● After swizzling, all short page identifiers point to virtual memory addresses
allocated for the corresponding pages
● functions accessing the objects are not even aware that it has persistent
pointers, and do not need to be changed in any way!
● can reuse existing code and libraries that use in-memory pointers
● After this, the pointer dereference that triggered the swizzling can continue
● Optimizations:
● If all pages are allocated the same address as in the short page identifier, no
changes required in the page!
● No need for deswizzling — swizzled page can be saved as-is to disk
● A set of pages (segment) can share one translation table. Pages can still be
swizzled as and when fetched (old copy of translation table is needed).
● A process should not access more pages than size of virtual memory — reuse of
virtual memory addresses for other pages is expensive

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.82 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Disk versus Memory Structure of Objects

● The format in which objects are stored in memory may be different from the
formal in which they are stored on disk in the database. Reasons are:
● software swizzling – structure of persistent and in-memory pointers are
different
● database accessible from different machines, with different data
representations
● Make the physical representation of objects in the database independent of
the machine and the compiler.
● Can transparently convert from disk representation to form required on the
specific machine, language, and compiler, when the object (or page) is
brought into memory.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.83 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Large Objects
● Large objects : binary large objects (blobs) and character large objects
(clobs)
● Examples include:
4 text documents
4 graphical data such as images and computer aided designs audio and
video data
● Large objects may need to be stored in a contiguous sequence of bytes when
brought into memory.
● If an object is bigger than a page, contiguous pages of the buffer pool
must be allocated to store it.
● May be preferable to disallow direct access to data, and only allow
access through a file-system-like API, to remove need for contiguous
storage.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.84 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Modifying Large Objects
● If the application requires insert/delete of bytes from specified regions of an
object:
● B+-tree file organization (described later in Chapter 12) can be modified to
represent large objects
● Each leaf page of the tree stores between half and 1 page worth of data from
the object
● Special-purpose application programs outside the database are used to manipulate
large objects:
● Text data treated as a byte string manipulated by editors and formatters.
● Graphical data and audio/video data is typically created and displayed by
separate application
● checkout/checkin method for concurrency control and creation of versions

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Oct 23, 2005. 11.85 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan