Accession Number:

ADA187244

Title:

The Design of the POSTGRES Storage System

Descriptive Note:

Technical rept.

Corporate Author:

CALIFORNIA UNIV BERKELEY ELECTRONICS RESEARCH LAB

Personal Author(s):

• Stonebraker, Michael

Report Date:

1987-02-04

Pagination or Media Count:

26.0

Abstract:

This paper presents the design of the storage system for the POSTGRES data base system under construction at Berkeley. It is novel in several ways. First, the storage manager supports transaction management but does so without using a conventional write ahead log WAL. In fact, there is no code to run at recovery time, and consequently recovery from crashes is essentially instantaneous. Second, the storage manager allows a user to optionally keep the entire past history of data base objects by closely integrating an archival storage system to which historical records are spooled. Lastly, the storage manager is consciously constructed as a collection of asynchronous processes. Hence, a large monolithic body of code is avoided and opportunities for parallelism can be exploited. The paper concludes with a analysis of the storage system which suggests that it is performance competitive with WAL systems in many situations.

Descriptors:

• *DATA STORAGE SYSTEMS
• *MODULES(ELECTRONICS)
• ARCHIVES
• ASYNCHRONOUS SYSTEMS
• COLLECTION
• CRASHES
• DATA BASES
• RECOVERY
• SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
• TIME
• WRITING

Subject Categories:

• Computer Hardware

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE