Improving Database Performance through Prefetching

Faculty: Anastassia Ailamaki and Todd Mowry (CMU), Phil Gibbons (Intel Research&CMU)

Student: Shimin Chen

We are exploring the latency hiding approaches, cache prefetching and I/O prefetching, to improve database performance. We have used cache prefetching to improve main memory B+tree performance (SIGMOD'01), studied fractal prefetching B+trees to optimize both disk and cache performance with a single index structure (SIGMOD'02), and improved hash join performance with prefetching (submitted). We are now focusing on prediction schemes using history information to improve general join algorithms.

Publications

     * Shimin Chen, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Todd C. Mowry. "Improving Index Performance through Prefetching". In proceedings of SIGMOD 2001. Also available as a technical report CMU-CS-00-177, December 2000.

     * Shimin Chen, Phillip B. Gibbons, Todd C. Mowry, and Gary Valentin. "Fractal Prefetching B+-Trees: Optimizing Both Cache and Disk Performance". In proceedings of SIGMOD 2002. Also available as a technical report CMU-CS-02-115, March 2002

     * Shimin Chen, Anastassia Ailamaki, Phillip B. Gibbons, Todd C. Mowry. "Improving Hash Join Performance through Prefetching". In proceedings of ICDE 2004.