An Analytical Study of Object Identifier Indexing

The object identifier index of an object-oriented database system is typically 20% of the size of the database itself, and for large databases, only a small part of the index fits in main memory. To avoid index retrievals becoming a bottleneck, efficient buffering strategies are needed to minimize the number of disk accesses. In this report, we develop analytical cost models which we use to find optimal sizes of index page buffer and index entry cache, for different memory sizes, index sizes, and access patterns. Because existing buffer hit estimation models are not applicable for index page buffering in the case of tree based indexes, we have also developed an analytical model for index page buffer performance. The cost gain from using the results in this report is typically in the order of 200-300%. Thus, the results should be of valuable use in optimizers and tools for configuration and tuning of object-oriented database systems.