Write-Optimized B-Trees

Large writes are beneficial both on individual disks and on disk arrays, e.g., RAID-5. The presented design enables large writes of internal B-tree nodes and leaves. It supports both in-place updates and large append-only (“log-structured”) write operations within the same storage volume, within the same B-tree, and even at the same time. The essence of the proposal is to make page migration inexpensive, to migrate pages while writing them, and to make such migration optional rather than mandatory as in log-structured file systems. The inexpensive page migration also aids traditional defragmentation as well as consolidation of free space needed for future large writes. These advantages are achieved with a very limited modification to conventional B-trees that also simplifies other B-tree operations, e.g., key range locking and compression. Prior proposals and prototypes implemented transacted B-tree on top of log-structured file systems and added transaction support to log-structu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Goetz Graefe
• Keywords: B-tree, Database, Large Writes, Log-structured File Systems, VLDB 2004