A Prefetching Technique for Object-Oriented Databases

Authors:	Nils Knafla
Date:	July 1997
Type:	Paper presented at the 15th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD15, Advances in Databases, London, United Kingdom, 7-9th July 1997, Springer Verlag, pages 154-168
Institution:	Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University

Abstract

We present a new prefetching technique for object-oriented databases which exploits the availability of multiprocessor client workstations. The prefetching information is obtained from the object relationships on the database pages and is stored in a Prefetch Object Table. This prefetching algorithm is implemented using multithreading. In the results we show the theoretical and empirical benefits of prefetching. The benchmark tests show that multithreaded prefetching can improve performance significantly for applications where the object access is reasonably predictable.

Nils Knafla, <nk@dcs.ed.ac.uk>