The MaStA I/O Cost Model and its Validation Strategy

Crash recovery in database systems aims to provide an acceptable level of protection from failure at a given engineering cost. A large number of recovery mechanisms are known, and have been compared both analytically and empirically. However, recent trends in computer hardware present different engineering tradeoffs in the design of recovery mechanisms. In particular, the comparative improvement in the speed of processors over disks suggests that disk I/O activity is the dominant expense. Furthermore, the improvement of disk transfer time relative to seek time has made patterns of disk access more significant. The contribution of the MaStA (Massachusetts St Andrews) cost model is that it is structured independently of machine architectures and application workloads. It determines costs in terms of I/O categories, access patterns and application workload parameters. The main features of the model are: • Cost is based upon a probabilistic estimation of disk activity, broken down into ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: ADBIS
• Authors: S. Scheuerl, Richard C. H. Connor, Ronald Morrison, J. Eliot B. Moss, David S. Munro
• Keywords: ADBIS 1995, Application Workload, Database, Disk I/o Activity, Recovery Mechanisms