Performance Evaluation of Integrity Control in a Parallel Main-Memory Database System

Integrity control is an important task of modern database management systems. One of the key problems impeding its general use in real-world applications is formed by the high processing costs associated with integrity constraint enforcement. Notwithstanding this observation, little attention has been paid in literature to the performance evaluation of integrity control mechanisms. This paper adresses this issue and has a threefold message. Firstly, it shows that integrity control can easily be integrated in a parallel, main-memory database system. Secondly, it demonstrates that parallelism and main-memory data storage are effective ways to deal with costly constraint enforcement. Thirdly, the overhead of constraint enforcement is shown to be acceptable compared to the execution of transactions without integrity control. The conclusion is drawn, that integrity control is well feasible in high-performance database systems.