Improving Index Performance through Prefetching

This paper proposes and evaluates Prefetching B+ -Trees pB+ -Trees, which use prefetching to accelerate two important operations on B+ -Tree indices: searches and range scans. To accelerate searches, pB+ -Trees use prefetching to e ectively create wider nodes than the natural data transfer size: e.g., eight vs. one cache lines or disk pages. These wider nodes reduce the height of the B+ -Tree, thereby decreasing the number of expensive misses when going from parent to child without signi cantly increasing the cost of fetching a given node. Our results show that this technique

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Shimin Chen, Phillip B. Gibbons, Todd C. Mowry
• Keywords: B+ -Tree Indices, Create Wider Nodes, Data Transfer Size, Database, SIGMOD 2001