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Physical Layer Tuning

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Definition

Tuning the physical layer entails choosing and configuring the underlying hardware and operating system to improve the performance of a database system running a given set of applications.

Historical Background

Ultimately, a database management system runs on processor and memory chips as well as secondary devices such as flash memory and disks. Trying to use those physical resources in the best way possible has been a problem since the first databases were available. Many researchers have noticed that disk capacity has been less of an issue than disk speed (or aggregate bandwidth from an entire disk array). Main memory size has always been a critical factor, because accesses to main memory are so much faster than accesses to disk. Processor speed has been important in applications that mix sophisticated computation with data access (for example in financial analysis), such computations are often handled outside the database server. New technologies have improved the...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Gray J. and Kukol P. Sequential disk IO tests for GBps land speed record. MS Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2004–62.

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  2. Gray J. and Shanoy P.J. Rules of thumb in data engineering. In Proc. 18th Int. Conf. on Data Engineering, 2000.

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  3. Hall C. and Bonnet Ph. Getting priorities straight: improving Linux support for database I/O. In Proc. 31st Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 2005.

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  4. Shasha D. and Bonnet P. Database tuning: principles, experiments and troubleshooting techniques. Morgan Kaufmann, 2002.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Philippe Bonnet

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Dennis Shasha

Authors
  1. Philippe Bonnet
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  2. Dennis Shasha
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Bonnet, P., Shasha, D. (2009). Physical Layer Tuning. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_268

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