Cache Conscious Indexing for Decision-Support in Main Memory

We study indexing techniques for main memory, including hash indexes, binary search trees, T-trees, B+-trees, interpolation search, and binary search on arrays. In a decision-support context, our primary concerns are the lookup time, and the space occupied by the index structure. Our goal is to provide faster lookup times than binary search by paying attention to reference locality and cache behavior, without using substantial extra space. We propose a new indexing technique called \Cache-Sensitive Search Trees" (CSS-trees). Our technique stores a directory structure on top of a sorted array. Nodes in this directory have size matching the cache-line size of the machine. We store the directory in an array and do not store internal-node pointers; child nodes can be found by performing arithmetic on array osets. We compare the algorithms based on their time and space requirements. We have implemented all of the techniques, and present a performance study on two popular modern machines. We demonstrate that with This research was supported by a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, by an NSF Young Investigator Award, by NSF grant number IIS-98-12014, and by NSF CISE award CDA-9625374.