Local Disk Caching

This chapter explores the use of client disks as an additional resource that can be used to improve system performance and scalability. As was stated in Section 2.1, most current ODBMSs exploit client processor resources through the use of a data-shipping architecture, which enables much of the work of data manipulation to be performed at clients. Furthermore, as described in the preceding chapters, systems can exploit client memory resources through the use of intra- and inter-transaction caching and global memory management techniques. In contrast, existing systems provide only limited support for exploiting client disk resources. This omission is potentially costly, as client disks represent a valuable addition to the storage hierarchy of a client-server ODBMS due to their capacity and non-volatility. This chapter addresses this issue by investigating the performance gains that can be realized by adding client disks to the storage hierarchy of page server DBMSs.1