Computer architecture for commercial workloads

Abstract

A relational database is a typical example of commercial system. In this paper, we review various architectures for a database system. First we characterize the database workload on a single processor, and then we describe several ways to construct parallel database systems. If the database contents are too large to fit in main memory, it is critical that the architecture offers a decent memory hierarchy. It is equally important for the database software to be aware of the memory hierarchy and to take advantage of locality of reference.