Online Management of Massive Data on Tertiary Storage: Dream or Reality?

Despite the decrease in disk price and the increase in disk storage capacity, the storage requirements of many organizations still can’t be met economically using disk system alone. Tertiary storage offers a lower-cost alternative. Whether it is feasible to manage massive data on tertiary storage or not is still a question with no answer. In this paper, we take the join operation, which is one of most common and time consuming database operations, for example to demonstrate the feasibility of online management of massive data on tertiary storage. The experimental results show that it is more important to choose the right operation algorithm than to choose the storage devices in the analysis and mining of massive data. Tertiary storages can be used to manage massive data as effective as disks and they provide a new solution to the problem of online querying and accommodating massive data