Tabular Placement of Relational Data on MEMS-based Storage Devices Hailing Yu, Divyakant Agrawal, and Amr El Abbadi   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Storage Management (Session B9) Abstract Due to the advances in semiconductor manufac- turing, the gap between main memory and sec- ondary storage is constantly increasing. This be- comes a significant performance bottleneck for Database Management Systems, which rely on secondary storage heavily to store large datasets. Recent advances in nanotechnology have led to the invention of alternative means for persistent storage. In particular, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) based storage technology has emerged as the leading candidate for next genera- tion storage systems. In order to integrate MEMS- based storage into conventional computing plat- form, new techniques are needed for I/O schedul- ing and data placement. In the context of relational data, it has been ob- served that access to relations needs to be en- abled in both row-wise as well as in column-wise fashions. In this paper, we exploit the physical characteristics of MEMS-based storage devices to develop a data placement scheme for relational data that enables retrieval in both row-wise and column-wise manner. We demonstrate that this data layout not only improves I/O utilization, but results in better cache performance. ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery