Storage and File Structure

Prof. S. Sudarshan
(with changes made by P S Dhabe)

Database System Concepts, 5th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Our Syllabus

 Storage and File structure, Files with Fixed / Variable Length Records,

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Memory hierarchy
Size Processor Cost per byte
registers

Cache (L1-on-chip/L2- off-chip)

Main memory (RAM)

Secondary memory
(Hard Disk)

Tertiary storage memory

(Tape )

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.3 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Storage Hierarchy

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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
battery-backed up main-memory.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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 =
10–9 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.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.6 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.8 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.9 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.11 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Storage Hierarchy

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.12 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.13 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Magnetic Hard Disk Mechanism

NOTE: Diagram is schematic, and simplifies the structure of actual disk drives
Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.14 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.15 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.16 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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 won’t match recomputed checksum
 Ensures successful writing by reading back sector after writing
it
 Performs remapping of bad sectors

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.17 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.18 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Performance Measures of Disks
 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.)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.19 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.20 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.21 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.22 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.23 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Optimization of Disk Block Access (Cont.)
 Nonvolatile write buffers speed up disk writes by writing blocks to
a non-volatile 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.24 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.25 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.26 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.27 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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 user’s
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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.28 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.29 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 File structure
File info
-size
-Pointer to actual
Header data
-Encryption
-Compression
-Version

Actual data

Trailer

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.30 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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.
e.g. (e_id, dept_no, salary)
(101,10, 20000)
 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.

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.31 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.32 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Free Lists
 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.)

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.33 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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 (like arrays)
(used in some older data models).

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.34 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Variable-Length Records: Slotted Page
Structure

 Slotted page header contains: Records are

 number of record entries stored
contiguously from
 end of free space in the block the end of 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.
Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.35 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.36 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.37 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.38 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Multitable Clustering File Organization (cont.)

 Store several relations in one file using a multitable

clustering file organization
 Multitable clustering organization of customer and depositor:

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.39 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Multitable Clustering File Organization

Customer=(name, street, city)

depositor=(name, A_no)

 good for queries involving depositor customer, and for

queries involving one single customer and his accounts
 bad for queries involving only customer

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.40 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Clustering File Structure With Pointer Chains

Database System Concepts - 5th Edition 11.41 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan