A survey of DBMS research issues in supporting very large tables

Abstract

A number of interesting problems arise in supporting the efficient and flexible storage, maintenance and manipulation of large volumes of data (e.g., > 100 gigabytes of data in a single table). Very large tables are becoming common. Typically, high availability is an important requirement for such data. The currently-popular relational DBMSs have been very slow in providing the needed support. To make it possible for RDBMSs to be deployed for managing many large enterprises' operational data and to support complex queries efficiently, these features are very crucial. We discuss some of the issues involved in improving the availability and efficient accessibility of partitioned tables via parallefism, free-granularity locking, transient versioning and partition independence. We outline some solutions that have been proposed. These solutions relate to algorithms for index building, utilities for fuzzy backups, incremental recovery and reorganization, buffer management, transient versioning, concurrency control and record management.