A Suggestion For Performance Improvement In A Relational Database Machine

Database machines are special purpose backend architectures that are designed to support efficiently database management system operations. An important problem in the development of database machines has been that of increasing their performance. Earlier research on the performance evaluation of database machines has indicated that I/O operations constitute a principle performance bottleneck. This is increasingly the case with the advances in multiprocessing and a growth in the volume of data handled by a database machine. One possible strategy to improve the performance of such a system which handles huge volumes of data is to store the data in a compressed form. This can be achieved by introducing VLSI chips for data compression so that data can be compressed and decompressed on-the-fly . A set of hardware algorithms for data compression based on the Huffman coding scheme proposed in an earlier work is described. The main focus of this paper is the investigation conducted by the authors to study the effect of incorporating such hardware in a special purpose backend relational database machine. Detailed analytical models of a relational database machine and the analytical results that quantify the performance improvement due to compression hardware are presented