Physical Pointer Swizzling

Most of todays object oriented database systems (OODBS) employ a two-level architecture consisting of an object level and a storage level containing database objects in different formats. Before objects can be used by an application program, they have to be converted from their storage format to an in-memory format. An important aspect in this process is the conversion of references between objects to in-memory pointers so that object access is accelerated. These conversion mechanisms for references are so-called pointer swizzling strategies. Existing pointer swizzling strategies consist of many processing steps, and thus, are cumbersome and timeconsuming. We introduce the physical pointer swizzling strategy which is based on a different kind of persistent references representation in the storage format, and results in a reduction of the number of conversion steps. By using the OO7 benchmark, we show that the physical pointer swizzling strategy achieves a twofold speedup in the convers..