A Column-Aware Index Management Using Flash Memory for Read-Intensive Databases

Most traditional database systems exploit a record-oriented model where the attributes of a record are placed contiguously in a hard disk to achieve high performance writes. However, for read-mostly data warehouse systems, the column-oriented database has become a proper model because of its superior read performance. Today, flash memory is largely recognized as the preferred storage media for high-speed database systems. In this paper, we introduce a column-oriented database model based on flash memory and then propose a new column-aware flash indexing scheme for the high-speed column-oriented data warehouse systems. Our index management scheme, which uses an enhanced B+-Tree, achieves superior search performance by indexing an embedded segment and packing an unused space in internal and leaf nodes. Based on the performance results of two test databases, we concluded that the column-aware flash index management outperforms the traditional scheme in the respect of the mixed operation throughput and its response time.