Design and Implementation of an Index Manager for a Main Memory DBMS

The main memory DBMS(MMDBMS) efficiently supports various database applications that require high performance since it employs main memory rather than disk a primary storage. In this paper, we discuss the experiences obtained in developing the index manager of the Tachyon, a next-generation MMDMBS. The index manager is an essential sub-component of the DBMS used to speed up the retrieval of objects from a large volume of a database in response to a certain search condition. Previous research efforts on indexing proposed barious index structures. However, they hardly dealt with the practical issues occurred in implementing an index manager on a target DBMS. In this paper, we touch these issues and present our experiences in developing the index manager on the Tachyon as solutions. The main issues touched are (1) compact representation of an index entry, (2) support of vaiable-length keys, (3) support of multiple-attribute keys, (4) support of duplicated keys, (5) definition of external AOIs, (6) concurrency control, and (7) backup and recovery, We believe that our contribution would help MMDBMS developers highly reduce their trial-and-errors.