Good Enough Database Caching

"Good Enough " Database Caching

Client Data Caching

Despite the significant ongoing work in the development of new database systems, many of the basic architectural and performance tradeoffs involved in their design have not previously been explored in a systematic manner. The designers of the various systems have adopted a wide range of strategies in areas such as process structure, client-server interaction, concurrency control, transaction management, and memory management. This monograph investigates several fundamental aspects of the emerging generation of database systems. It describes and investigates implementation techniques to provide high performance and scalability while maintaining the transaction semantics, reliability, and availability associated with more traditional database architectures. The common theme of the techniques developed here is the exploitation of client resources through caching-based data replication. Client Data Caching: A Foundation for High Performance Object Database Systems should be a value to anyone interested in the performance and architecture of distributed information systems in general and Object-based Database Management Systems in particular. It provides useful information for designers of such systems, as well as for practitioners who need to understand the inherent tradeoffs among the architectural alternatives in order to evaluate existing systems. Furthermore, many of the issues addressed in this book are relevant to other systems beyond the ODBMS domain. Such systems include shared-disk parallel database systems, distributed file systems, and distributed virtual memory systems. The presentation is suitable for practitioners and advanced students in all of these areas, although a basic understanding of database transaction semantics and techniques is assumed.

MMIXware

MMIX is a RISC computer designed by Don Knuth to illustrate machine-level aspects of programming. In the author's book series "The Art of Computer Programming", MMIX replaces the 1960s-style machine MIX. A particular goal in the design of MMIX was to keep its machine language simple, elegant, and easy to learn. At the same time, all of the complexities needed to achieve high performance in practice are taken into account. This book constitutes a collection of programs written in CWEB that make MMIX a virtual reality. Among other utilities, an assembler converting MMIX symbolic files to MMIX objects and two simulators executing the programs in given object files are provided. The latest version of all programs can be downloaded from MMIX's home page. The book provides a complete documentation of the MMIX computer and its assembly language. It also presents mini-indexes, which make the programs much easier to understand. A corrected reprint of the book has been published in August 2014, replacing the version of 1999.