A Storage Server for the Efficient Support of Complex Objects

Complex objects are a major advance achieved in modern database systems (DBS) to provide powerful data modelling capabilities. A complex object is highly structured, containing many dependent or independent subobjects. Most of today's DBS are based on the traditional two-level DBS architecture consisting of a storage and a logical data model level. In these systems, the structural aspect of a complex object is managed on the data model level, but lacks specific support from the storage level which could enhance overall DBS performance. In this paper, we present the concepts and implementation of the KIOSK storage object server designed to efficiently load complex objects from secondary storage. KIOSK introduces the notion of complex storage objects which facilitates modelling the structural aspect of complex objects at the storage level. KIOSK provides operators to load a complex storage object in its entirety from disk in one access and additionally allows clients to retrieve dynamica..