Storage and File Structure

Overview of Physical Storage Media Magnetic Disks RAID Tertiary Storage Storage Access File Organization Organization of Records in Files Data-Dictionary Storage

Classification of Physical Storage Media

Speed with which data can be accessed Cost per unit of data Reliability data loss on power failure or system crash physical failure of the storage device Can differentiate storage into: volatile storage: loses contents when power is switched off non-volatile storage: Contents persist even when power is switched off. Includes secondary and tertiary storage, as well as batterybacked up main-memory.

Physical Storage Media

Cache fastest and most costly form of storage; volatile; managed by the computer system hardware (Note: Cache is pronounced as cash) Main memory: fast access (10s to 100s of nanoseconds; 1 nanosecond = 109 seconds) generally too small (or too expensive) to store the entire database capacities of up to a few Gigabytes widely used currently Capacities have gone up and per-byte costs have decreased steadily and rapidly (roughly factor of 2 every 2 to 3 years) Volatile contents of main memory are usually lost if a power failure or system crash occurs.

Physical Storage Media (Cont.)

Flash memory Data survives power failure Data can be written at a location only once, but location can be erased and written to again Can support only a limited number (10K 1M) of write/erase cycles. Erasing of memory has to be done to an entire bank of memory Reads are roughly as fast as main memory But writes are slow (few microseconds), erase is slower

Physical Storage Media (Cont.)

Flash memory NOR Flash Fast reads, very slow erase, lower capacity Used to store program code in many embedded devices NAND Flash Page-at-a-time read/write, multi-page erase High capacity (several GB) Widely used as data storage mechanism in portable devices

Physical Storage Media (Cont.)

Magnetic-disk
Data is stored on spinning disk, and read/written magnetically Primary medium for the long-term storage of data; typically stores entire database. Data must be moved from disk to main memory for access, and written back for storage direct-access possible to read data on disk in any order, unlike magnetic tape Survives power failures and system crashes disk failure can destroy data: is rare but does happen

Physical Storage Media (Cont.)

Optical storage non-volatile, data is read optically from a spinning disk using a laser CD-ROM (640 MB) and DVD (4.7 to 17 GB) most popular forms Write-one, read-many (WORM) optical disks used for archival storage (CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R) Multiple write versions also available (CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM) Reads and writes are slower than with magnetic disk Juke-box systems, with large numbers of removable disks, a few drives, and a mechanism for automatic loading/unloading of disks available for storing large volumes of data

Physical Storage Media (Cont.)

Tape storage non-volatile, used primarily for backup (to recover from disk failure), and for archival data sequential-access much slower than disk very high capacity (40 to 300 GB tapes available) tape can be removed from drive storage costs much cheaper than disk, but drives are expensive Tape jukeboxes available for storing massive amounts of data hundreds of terabytes (1 terabyte = 109 bytes) to even a petabyte (1 petabyte = 1012 bytes)

Storage Hierarchy

Storage Hierarchy (Cont.)

primary storage: Fastest media but volatile (cache, main memory). secondary storage: next level in hierarchy, non-volatile, moderately fast access time also called on-line storage E.g. flash memory, magnetic disks tertiary storage: lowest level in hierarchy, non-volatile, slow access time also called off-line storage E.g. magnetic tape, optical storage

Magnetic Hard Disk Mechanism

NOTE: Diagram is schematic, and simplifies the structure of actual disk drives

Magnetic Disks
Read-write head Positioned very close to the platter surface (almost touching it) Reads or writes magnetically encoded information. Surface of platter divided into circular tracks Over 50K-100K tracks per platter on typical hard disks Each track is divided into sectors. Sector size typically 512 bytes Typical sectors per track: 500 (on inner tracks) to 1000 (on outer tracks) To read/write a sector disk arm swings to position head on right track platter spins continually; data is read/written as sector passes under head

Magnetic Disks (Cont.)

Head-disk assemblies multiple disk platters on a single spindle (1 to 5 usually) one head per platter, mounted on a common arm. Cylinder i consists of ith track of all the platters Earlier generation disks were susceptible to head-crashes leading to loss of all data on disk Current generation disks are less susceptible to such disastrous failures, but individual sectors may get corrupted

Disk Controller
Disk controller interfaces between the computer system and the disk drive hardware.

accepts high-level commands to read or write a sector

initiates actions such as moving the disk arm to the right track and actually reading or writing the data Computes and attaches checksums to each sector to verify that data is read back correctly If data is corrupted, with very high probability stored checksum wont match recomputed checksum Ensures successful writing by reading back sector after writing it Performs remapping of bad sectors

Disk Subsystem

Disk interface standards families ATA (AT adaptor) range of standards

SATA (Serial ATA)

SCSI (Small Computer System Interconnect) range of standards Several variants of each standard (different speeds and capabilities)

 Access time the time it takes from when a read or write request is issued to when data transfer begins. Consists of: Seek time time it takes to reposition the arm over the correct track. Average seek time is 1/2 the worst case seek time. Would be 1/3 if all tracks had the same number of sectors, and we ignore the time to start and stop arm movement 4 to 10 milliseconds on typical disks Rotational latency time it takes for the sector to be accessed to appear under the head. Average latency is 1/2 of the worst case latency. 4 to 11 milliseconds on typical disks (5400 to 15000 r.p.m.)

Performance Measures of Disks

Performance Measures (Cont.)

Data-transfer rate the rate at which data can be retrieved from or stored to the disk. 25 to 100 MB per second max rate, lower for inner tracks Multiple disks may share a controller, so rate that controller can handle is also important E.g. ATA-5: 66 MB/sec, SATA: 150 MB/sec, Ultra 320 SCSI: 320 MB/s Fiber Channel (FC2Gb): 256 MB/s

Performance Measures (Cont.)

Mean time to failure (MTTF) the average time the disk is expected to run continuously without any failure. Typically 3 to 5 years Probability of failure of new disks is quite low, corresponding to a theoretical MTTF of 500,000 to 1,200,000 hours for a new disk E.g., an MTTF of 1,200,000 hours for a new disk means that given 1000 relatively new disks, on an average one will fail every 1200 hours MTTF decreases as disk ages

Optimization of Disk-Block Access

Block a contiguous sequence of sectors from a single track data is transferred between disk and main memory in blocks Typical block sizes today range from 4 to 16 kilobytes Disk-arm-scheduling algorithms order pending accesses to tracks so that disk arm movement is minimized elevator algorithm : move disk arm in one direction (from outer to inner tracks or vice versa), processing next request in that direction, till no more requests in that direction, then reverse direction and repeat

Optimization of Disk Block Access (Cont.)

File organization optimize block access time by organizing the blocks to correspond to how data will be accessed E.g. Store related information on the same or nearby blocks/cylinders. File systems attempt to allocate contiguous chunks of blocks (e.g. 8 or 16 blocks) to a file Files may get fragmented over time E.g. if data is inserted to/deleted from the file Or free blocks on disk are scattered, and newly created file has its blocks scattered over the disk Sequential access to a fragmented file results in increased disk arm movement Some systems have utilities to defragment the file system, in order to speed up file access

Optimization of Disk Block Access (Cont.)

Nonvolatile write buffers speed up disk writes by writing blocks to a nonvolatile RAM buffer immediately Non-volatile RAM: battery backed up RAM or flash memory Even if power fails, the data is safe and will be written to disk when power returns Controller then writes to disk whenever the disk has no other requests or request has been pending for some time Database operations that require data to be safely stored before continuing can continue without waiting for data to be written to disk Writes can be reordered to minimize disk arm movement

Optimization of Disk Block Access (Cont.)

Log disk a disk devoted to writing a sequential log of block updates Used exactly like nonvolatile RAM Write to log disk is very fast since no seeks are required No need for special hardware (NV-RAM) File systems typically reorder writes to disk to improve performance Journaling file systems write data in safe order to NV-RAM or log disk Reordering without journaling: risk of corruption of file system data

 RAID: Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks disk organization techniques that manage a large numbers of disks, providing a view of a single disk of high capacity and high speed by using multiple disks in parallel, and high reliability by storing data redundantly, so that data can be recovered even if a disk fails The chance that some disk out of a set of N disks will fail is much higher than the chance that a specific single disk will fail. E.g., a system with 100 disks, each with MTTF of 100,000 hours (approx. 11 years), will have a system MTTF of 1000 hours (approx. 41 days)

RAID

Improvement of Reliability via Redundancy

Redundancy store extra information that can be used to rebuild information lost in a disk failure E.g., Mirroring (or shadowing) Duplicate every disk. Logical disk consists of two physical disks. Every write is carried out on both disks Reads can take place from either disk If one disk in a pair fails, data still available in the other Data loss would occur only if a disk fails, and its mirror disk also fails before the system is repaired Probability of combined event is very small Except for dependent failure modes such as fire or building collapse or electrical power surges

Improvement of Reliability via Redundancy

Mean time to data loss depends on mean time to failure, and mean time to repair E.g. MTTF of 100,000 hours, mean time to repair of 10 hours gives mean time to data loss of 500*106 hours (or 57,000 years) for a mirrored pair of disks (ignoring dependent failure modes)

Improvement in Performance via Parallelism

Two main goals of parallelism in a disk system:

1. Load balance multiple small accesses to increase throughput 2. Parallelize large accesses to reduce response time. Improve transfer rate by striping data across multiple disks. Bit-level striping split the bits of each byte across multiple disks But seek/access time worse than for a single disk Bit level striping is not used much any more Block-level striping with n disks, block i of a file goes to disk (i mod n) + 1 Requests for different blocks can run in parallel if the blocks reside on different disks A request for a long sequence of blocks can utilize all disks in parallel

RAID Levels RAID organizations, or RAID levels, have differing cost, performance and

reliability characteristics RAID Level 0: Block striping; non-redundant. Used in high-performance applications where data lost is not critical. RAID Level 1: Mirrored disks with block striping Offers best write performance. Popular for applications such as storing log files in a database system.

 RAID Level 2: Memory-Style Error-Correcting-Codes (ECC) with bit striping. RAID Level 3: Bit-Interleaved Parity

RAID Levels (Cont.)

a single parity bit is enough for error correction, not just detection When writing data, corresponding parity bits must also be computed and written to a parity bit disk To recover data in a damaged disk, compute XOR of bits from other disks (including parity bit disk)

RAID Levels (Cont.)

RAID Level 3 (Cont.) Faster data transfer than with a single disk, but fewer I/Os per second since every disk has to participate in every I/O. RAID Level 4: Block-Interleaved Parity; uses block-level striping, and keeps a parity block on a separate disk for corresponding blocks from N other disks. When writing data block, corresponding block of parity bits must also be computed and written to parity disk To find value of a damaged block, compute XOR of bits from corresponding blocks (including parity block) from other disks.

RAID Levels (Cont.)

RAID Level 4 (Cont.) Provides higher I/O rates for independent block reads than Level 3 block read goes to a single disk, so blocks stored on different disks can be read in parallel Before writing a block, parity data must be computed Can be done by using old parity block, old value of current block and new value of current block (2 block reads + 2 block writes) Or by recomputing the parity value using the new values of blocks corresponding to the parity block More efficient for writing large amounts of data sequentially Parity block becomes a bottleneck for independent block writes since every block write also writes to parity disk

RAID Levels (Cont.)

RAID Level 5: Block-Interleaved Distributed Parity; partitions data and parity among all N + 1 disks, rather than storing data in N disks and parity in 1 disk. E.g., with 5 disks, parity block for nth set of blocks is stored on disk (n mod 5) + 1, with the data blocks stored on the other 4 disks.

RAID Levels (Cont.)

RAID Level 5 (Cont.) Higher I/O rates than Level 4. Block writes occur in parallel if the blocks and their parity blocks are on different disks. Subsumes Level 4: provides same benefits, but avoids bottleneck of parity disk. RAID Level 6: P+Q Redundancy scheme; similar to Level 5, but stores extra redundant information to guard against multiple disk failures. Better reliability than Level 5 at a higher cost; not used as widely.

 Factors in choosing RAID level Monetary cost Performance: Number of I/O operations per second, and bandwidth during normal operation Performance during failure Performance during rebuild of failed disk Including time taken to rebuild failed disk

Choice of RAID Level

RAID 0 is used only when data safety is not important E.g. data can be recovered quickly from other sources Level 2 and 4 never used since they are subsumed by 3 and 5 Level 3 is not used since bit-striping forces single block reads to access all disks, wasting disk arm movement Level 6 is rarely used since levels 1 and 5 offer adequate safety for most applications So competition is mainly between 1 and 5

 Level 1 provides much better write performance than level 5 Level 5 requires at least 2 block reads and 2 block writes to write a single block, whereas Level 1 only requires 2 block writes Level 1 preferred for high update environments such as log disks Level 1 had higher storage cost than level 5 disk drive capacities increasing rapidly (50%/year) whereas disk access times have decreased much less (x 3 in 10 years) I/O requirements have increased greatly, e.g. for Web servers When enough disks have been bought to satisfy required rate of I/O, they often have spare storage capacity

Choice of RAID Level (Cont.)

so there is often no extra monetary cost for Level 1!

Level 5 is preferred for applications with low update rate, and large amounts of data

Level 1 is preferred for all other applications

Hardware Issues
Software RAID: RAID implementations done entirely in software, with no special hardware support Hardware RAID: RAID implementations with special hardware Use non-volatile RAM to record writes that are being executed Beware: power failure during write can result in corrupted disk E.g. failure after writing one block but before writing the second in a mirrored system Such corrupted data must be detected when power is restored Recovery from corruption is similar to recovery from failed disk NV-RAM helps to efficiently detected potentially corrupted blocks Otherwise all blocks of disk must be read and compared with mirror/parity block

Hardware Issues (Cont.)

Hot swapping: replacement of disk while system is running, without power down Supported by some hardware RAID systems, reduces time to recovery, and improves availability greatly Many systems maintain spare disks which are kept online, and used as replacements for failed disks immediately on detection of failure Reduces time to recovery greatly Many hardware RAID systems ensure that a single point of failure will not stop the functioning of the system by using Redundant power supplies with battery backup Multiple controllers and multiple interconnections to guard against controller/interconnection failures

RAID Terminology in the Industry

RAID terminology not very standard in the industry E.g. Many vendors use RAID 1: for mirroring without striping RAID 10 or RAID 1+0: for mirroring with striping Hardware RAID implementations often just offload RAID processing onto a separate subsystem, but dont offer NVRAM. Read the specs carefully! Software RAID supported directly in most operating systems today

 Compact disk-read only memory (CD-ROM) Seek time about 100 msec (optical read head is heavier and slower) Higher latency (3000 RPM) and lower data-transfer rates (3-6 MB/s) compared to magnetic disks Digital Video Disk (DVD) DVD-5 holds 4.7 GB , variants up to 17 GB Slow seek time, for same reasons as CD-ROM Record once versions (CD-R and DVD-R)

Optical Disks

Magnetic Tapes
Hold large volumes of data and provide high transfer rates
Few GB for DAT (Digital Audio Tape) format, 10-40 GB with DLT (Digital Linear Tape) format, 100 400 GB+ with Ultrium format, and 330 GB with Ampex helical scan format Transfer rates from few to 10s of MB/s Tapes are cheap, but cost of drives is very high

Currently the cheapest storage medium

Very slow access time in comparison to magnetic disks and optical disks
limited to sequential access. Some formats (Accelis) provide faster seek (10s of seconds) at cost of lower capacity

Used mainly for backup, for storage of infrequently used information, and as an off-line medium for transferring information from one system to another. Tape jukeboxes used for very large capacity storage
(terabyte (1012 bytes) to petabye (1015 bytes)

Storage Access
A database file is partitioned into fixed-length storage units called blocks. Blocks are units of both storage allocation and data transfer. Database system seeks to minimize the number of block transfers between the disk and memory. We can reduce the number of disk accesses by keeping as many blocks as possible in main memory. Buffer portion of main memory available to store copies of disk blocks. Buffer manager subsystem responsible for allocating buffer space in main memory.

Buffer Manager
Programs call on the buffer manager when they need a block from disk. Buffer manager does the following: If the block is already in the buffer, return the address of the block in main memory 1. If the block is not in the buffer 1. Allocate space in the buffer for the block 1. Replacing (throwing out) some other block, if required, to make space for the new block. 2. Replaced block written back to disk only if it was modified since the most recent time that it was written to/fetched from the disk. 2. Read the block from the disk to the buffer, and return the address of the block in main memory to requester.

Buffer-Replacement Policies
Most operating systems replace the block least recently used (LRU strategy) Idea behind LRU use past pattern of block references as a predictor of future references Queries have well-defined access patterns (such as sequential scans), and a database system can use the information in a users query to predict future references LRU can be a bad strategy for certain access patterns involving repeated scans of data

e.g. when computing the join of 2 relations r and s by a nested loops for each tuple tr of r do for each tuple ts of s do if the tuples tr and ts match
Mixed strategy with hints on replacement strategy provided by the query optimizer is preferable

Buffer-Replacement Policies (Cont.)

Pinned block memory block that is not allowed to be written back to disk. Toss-immediate strategy frees the space occupied by a block as soon as the final tuple of that block has been processed Most recently used (MRU) strategy system must pin the block currently being processed. After the final tuple of that block has been processed, the block is unpinned, and it becomes the most recently used block. Buffer manager can use statistical information regarding the probability that a request will reference a particular relation E.g., the data dictionary is frequently accessed. Heuristic: keep data-dictionary blocks in main memory buffer Buffer managers also support forced output of blocks for the purpose of recovery (more in Chapter 17)

File Organization
The database is stored as a collection of files. Each file is a sequence of records. A record is a sequence of fields. One approach: assume record size is fixed each file has records of one particular type only different files are used for different relations This case is easiest to implement; will consider variable length records later.

Fixed-Length Records
Simple approach: Store record i starting from byte n (i 1), where n is the size of each record. Record access is simple but records may cross blocks Modification: do not allow records to cross block boundaries Deletion of record i: alternatives: move records i + 1, . . ., n to i, . . . , n 1 move record n to i do not move records, but link all free records on a free list

Store the address of the first deleted record in the file header. Use this first record to store the address of the second deleted record, and so on Can think of these stored addresses as pointers since they point to the location of a record. More space efficient representation: reuse space for normal attributes of free records to store pointers. (No pointers stored in in-use records.)

Free Lists

Variable-Length Records
Variable-length records arise in database systems in several ways: Storage of multiple record types in a file. Record types that allow variable lengths for one or more fields. Record types that allow repeating fields (used in some older data models).

Variable-Length Records: Slotted Page Structure

Slotted page header contains: number of record entries end of free space in the block location and size of each record Records can be moved around within a page to keep them contiguous with no empty space between them; entry in the header must be updated. Pointers should not point directly to record instead they should point to the entry for the record in header.

Organization of Records in Files

Heap a record can be placed anywhere in the file where there is space Sequential store records in sequential order, based on the value of the search key of each record Hashing a hash function computed on some attribute of each record; the result specifies in which block of the file the record should be placed Records of each relation may be stored in a separate file. In a multitable clustering file organization records of several different relations can be stored in the same file Motivation: store related records on the same block to minimize I/O

Sequential File Organization

Suitable for applications that require sequential processing of the entire file The records in the file are ordered by a search-key

Sequential File Organization (Cont.)

Deletion use pointer chains Insertion locate the position where the record is to be inserted if there is free space insert there if no free space, insert the record in an overflow block In either case, pointer chain must be updated Need to reorganize the file from time to time to restore sequential order

Multitable Clustering File Organization (cont.)

Store several relations in one file using a multitable clustering file organization

Multitable clustering organization of customer and depositor:

good for queries involving depositor customer, and for queries involving one single customer and his accounts bad for queries involving only customer

Data Dictionary Storage

Data dictionary (also called system catalog) stores metadata: that is, data about data, such as Information about relations names of relations names and types of attributes of each relation names and definitions of views integrity constraints User and accounting information, including passwords Statistical and descriptive data number of tuples in each relation Physical file organization information How relation is stored (sequential/hash/) Physical location of relation Information about indices (Chapter 12)

Data Dictionary Storage (Cont.)

Catalog structure Relational representation on disk specialized data structures designed for efficient access, in memory A possible catalog representation:

Relation_metadata = (relation_name, number_of_attributes, storage_organization, location) Attribute_metadata = (relation_name, attribute_name, domain_type, position, length) User_metadata = (user_name, encrypted_password, group) Index_metadata = (relation_name, index_name, index_type, index_attributes) View_metadata = (view_name, definition)

Extra Slides

 Records with fixed length fields are easy to represent Similar to records (structs) in programming languages Extensions to represent null values E.g. a bitmap indicating which attributes are null Variable length fields can be represented by a pair (offset, length) offset: the location within the record, length: field length. All fields start at predefined location, but extra indirection required for variable length fields

Record Representation

A-102

10

400

000

Perryridge

balance account_number branch_name null-bitmap Example record structure of account record

Figure 11.4

Byte-String Representation of Variable-Length Records

Byte string representation Attach an end-of-record () control character to the end of each record Difficulty with deletion Difficulty with growth

 Use one or more fixed length records:

reserved space pointers

Fixed-Length Representation

Reserved space can use fixed-length records of a known maximum length; unused space in shorter records filled with a null or end-of-record symbol.