Chapter 9

Disk Storage and Indexing Structures for

Files

Copyright © 2004 Pearson Education, Inc.

 Outline

 Disk Storage Devices

 Files of Records
 Indexing Structures for Files

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -2

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Disk Storage Devices (cont.)

 Preferred secondary storage device for high

storage capacity and low cost.
 Data stored as magnetized areas on magnetic
disk surfaces.
 A disk pack contains several magnetic disks
connected to a rotating spindle.
 Disks are divided into concentric circular
tracks on each disk surface. Track capacities
vary typically from 4 to 50 Kbytes.
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -3
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Disk Storage Devices (cont.)
Because a track usually contains a large
amount of information, it is divided into
smaller blocks or sectors.
 The division of a track into sectors is hard-coded on
the disk surface and cannot be changed. One type of
sector organization calls a portion of a track that
subtends a fixed angle at the center as a sector.
 A track is divided into blocks. The block size B is
fixed for each system. Typical block sizes range from
B=512 bytes to B=4096 bytes. Whole blocks are
transferred between disk and main memory for
processing.
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -4
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Disk Storage Devices (cont.)

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -5

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Disk Storage Devices (cont.)
 A read-write head moves to the track that contains the block to
be transferred. Disk rotation moves the block under the read-
write head for reading or writing.
 A physical disk block (hardware) address consists of a cylinder
number (imaginery collection of tracks of same radius from all
recoreded surfaces), the track number or surface number (within
the cylinder), and block number (within track).
 Reading or writing a disk block is time consuming because of the
seek time s and rotational delay (latency) rd.
 Double buffering can be used to speed up the transfer of
contiguous disk blocks.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -6

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Disk Storage Devices (cont.)

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -7

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Records

 Fixed and variable length records

 Records contain fields which have values of a particular
type (e.g., amount, date, time, age)
 Fields themselves may be fixed length or variable length
 Variable length fields can be mixed into one record:
separator characters or length fields are needed so that the
record can be “parsed”.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -8

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 16.4 Placing File Records on Disk

 Record: collection of related data values or items

– Values correspond to record field
 Data types
– Numeric
– String
– Boolean
– Date/time
 Binary large objects (BLOBs)
– Unstructured objects
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 9
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Blocking

 Blocking: refers to storing a number of records in one blo

ck on the disk.
 Blocking factor (bfr) refers to the number of records per
block.
 There may be empty space in a block if an integral
number of records do not fit in one block.
 Spanned Records: refer to records that exceed the size of
one or more blocks and hence span a number of blocks.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -10

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Files of Records
 A file is a sequence of records, where each record is a
collection of data values (or data items).
 A file descriptor (or file header ) includes information
that describes the file, such as the field names and their
data types, and the addresses of the file blocks on disk.
 Records are stored on disk blocks. The blocking factor
bfr for a file is the (average) number of file records
stored in a disk block.
 A file can have fixed-length records or variable-length
records.
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -11
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Files of Records (cont.)
 File records can be unspanned (no record can span two
blocks) or spanned (a record can be stored in more than
one block).
 The physical disk blocks that are allocated to hold the
records of a file can be contiguous, linked, or indexed.
 In a file of fixed-length records, all records have the
same format. Usually, unspanned blocking is used with
such files.
 Files of variable-length records require additional
information to be stored in each record, such as
separator characters and field types. Usually spanned
blocking is used with such files.
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -12
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Placing File Records on Disk
(cont’d.)

 Reasons for variable-length records

– One or more fields have variable length
– One or more fields are repeating
– One or more fields are optional
– File contains records of different types

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 13

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Record Blocking and Spanned
Versus Unspanned Records

 File records allocated to disk blocks

 Spanned records
– Larger than a single block
– Pointer at end of first block points to block containing
remainder of record
 Unspanned
– Records not allowed to cross block boundaries

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 14

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Record Blocking and Spanned
Versus Unspanned Records
(cont’d.)
 Blocking factor
– Average number of records per block for the file

Figure 16.6 Types of record organization (a) Unspanned (b) Spanned

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16-15

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 8- 16
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Record Blocking and Spanned
Versus Unspanned Records
(cont’d.)
 Allocating file blocks on disk
– Contiguous allocation
– Linked allocation
– Indexed allocation
 File header (file descriptor)
– Contains file information needed by system programs
Disk addresses
Format descriptions

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 17

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Contiguous Allocation

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 18

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Linked Allocation

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 19

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 Indexed Allocation

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 20

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 I-Node

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 21

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Buffer Management and
Replacement Strategies

 Buffer management information

– Pin count
– Dirty bit
 Buffer replacement strategies
– Least recently used (LRU)
– Clock policy
– First-in-first-out (FIFO)
– MRU

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 22

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Buffer Management and
Replacement Strategies

 Buffer replacement strategies

– Policies like FIFO can be modified to make sure that pinned
blocks, such as root block of an index, are allowed to remain in
the buffer
– Modification of the clock policy exists where important buffers
flag can be set to higher values than 1
– DBMS has the ability to write certain blocks to disk even when
the space occupied by those blocks is not needed
– MRU work well when a block that is used most recently is not
needed until all the remaining blocks in the relation are
processed

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 16- 23

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Indexing Structures for Files

 Types of Single-level Ordered Indexes

– Primary Indexes
– Clustering Indexes
– Secondary Indexes
 Multilevel Indexes
 Dynamic Multilevel Indexes Using B-Trees and
B+-Trees
 Indexes on Multiple Keys

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -24

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Indexes as Access Paths

 A single-level index is an auxiliary file that makes it

more efficient to search for a record in the data file.

 The index is usually specified on one field of the file

(although it could be specified on several fields)

 One form of an index is a file of entries <field value,

pointer to record>, which is ordered by field value

 The index is called an access path on the field.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -25

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Indexes as Access Paths (contd.)
 The index file usually occupies considerably less disk
blocks than the data file because its entries are much
smaller
 A binary search on the index yields a pointer to the
file record
 Indexes can also be characterized as dense or sparse.
A dense index has an index entry for every
search key value (and hence every record) in the
data file.
A sparse (or nondense) index, on the other
hand, has index entries for only some of the
search values

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -26

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Indexes as Access Paths (contd.)
Example: Given the following data file:
EMPLOYEE(NAME, SSN, ADDRESS, JOB, SAL, ... )
Suppose that:
record size R=150 bytes
block size B=512 bytes
r=30000 records
Then, we get:
blocking factor Bfr= B div R= 512 div 150= 3 records/block
number of file blocks b= (r/Bfr)= (30000/3)= 10000 blocks

For an index on the SSN field, assume the field size V SSN=9 bytes,
assume the record pointer size PR=7 bytes. Then:
index entry size RI=(VSSN+ PR)=(9+7)=16 bytes
index blocking factor BfrI= B div RI= 512 div 16= 32 entries/block
number of index blocks b= (r/ BfrI)= (30000/32)= 938 blocks
binary search needs log2bI= log2938= 10 block accesses
This is compared to an average linear search cost of:
(b/2)= 30000/2= 15000 block accesses
If the file records are ordered, the binary search cost would be:
log2b= log230000= 15 block accesses
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -27
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Types of Single-Level Indexes

 Primary Index
– Defined on an ordered data file
– The data file is ordered on a key field
– Includes one index entry for each block in the data file; the
index entry has the key field value for the first record in the
block, which is called the block anchor
– A similar scheme can use the last record in a block.
– A primary index is a nondense (sparse) index, since it
includes an entry for each disk block of the data file and the
keys of its anchor record rather than for every search value.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -28

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -29
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Types of Single-Level Indexes

 Clustering Index

– Defined on an ordered data file

– The data file is ordered on a non-key field unlike primary

index, which requires that the ordering field of the data file
have a distinct value for each record.
– Includes one index entry for each distinct value of the field;
the index entry points to the first data block that contains
records with that field value.
– It is another example of nondense index where Insertion and
Deletion is relatively straightforward with a clustering index.
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -30
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -31
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -32
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Types of Single-Level Indexes
 Secondary Index
– A secondary index provides a secondary means of accessing a file
for which some primary access already exists.
– The secondary index may be on a field which is a candidate key and
has a unique value in every record, or a nonkey with duplicate
values.
– The index is an ordered file with two fields.
 The first field is of the same data type as some nonordering
field of the data file that is an indexing field.
 The second field is either a block pointer or a record pointer.
There can be many secondary indexes (and hence, indexing
fields) for the same file.
– Includes one entry for each record in the data file; hence, it is a
dense index
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -33
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
A dense secondary index (with
block pointers) on a
nonordering key field of a file.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -34

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
A secondary index (with recored pointers) on a
nonkey field implemented using one level of
indirection so that index entries are of fixed
length and have unique field values.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -35

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -36
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Multi-Level Indexes
 Because a single-level index is an ordered file, we can
create a primary index to the index itself ; in this case,
the original index file is called the first-level index and
the index to the index is called the second-level index.
 We can repeat the process, creating a third, fourth, ...,
top level until all entries of the top level fit in one disk
block
 A multi-level index can be created for any type of first-
level index (primary, secondary, clustering) as long as
the first-level index consists of more than one disk
block

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -37

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 A two-level primary index
resembling ISAM (Indexed
Sequential Access Method)
organization

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -38

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Dynamic Multi-Level Indexes

 To retain the benefits of using multilevel indexing

while reducing index insertion and deletion problems
 Leaves some space in each of its blocks for inserting
new entries and uses appropriate insertion/deletion
algorithms for creating and deleting new index blocks
when the data file grows and shrinks.
 Often implemented by using data structures called B-
trees and B+-trees

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -39

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Multi-Level Indexes

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -40

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Search Tree
 A search tree of order p is a tree such that each node
contains at most p − 1 search values and p pointers in the
order <P1, K1, P2, K2, ..., Pq−1, Kq−1, Pq>, where q ≤ p.
Each Pi is a pointer to a child node (or a NULL pointer),
and each Ki is a search value from some ordered set of
values. All search values are assumed to be unique

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -41

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 A search tree of order p = 3.

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -42

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Dynamic Multilevel Indexes Using B-
Trees and B+-Trees
 Because of the insertion and deletion problem, most
multi-level indexes use B-tree or B+-tree data
structures, which leave space in each tree node (disk
block) to allow for new index entries
 These data structures are variations of search trees that
allow efficient insertion and deletion of new search
values.
 In B-Tree and B+-Tree data structures, each node
corresponds to a disk block
 Each node is kept between half-full and completely full

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -43

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Dynamic Multilevel Indexes Using B-
Trees and B+-Trees (contd.)
 An insertion into a node that is not full is quite
efficient; if a node is full the insertion causes a split
into two nodes
 Splitting may propagate to other tree levels
 A deletion is quite efficient if a node does not become
less than half full
 If a deletion causes a node to become less than half
full, it must be merged with neighboring nodes

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -44

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Difference between B-tree and B+-tree

 In a B-tree, pointers to data records exist at all levels

of the tree

 In a B+-tree, all pointers to data records exists at the

leaf-level nodes

 A B+-tree can have less levels (or higher capacity of

search values) than the corresponding B-tree

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -45

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -46
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -47
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Indexes on Multiple Keys
 Ordered Index on Multiple Attributes
– Create a index on a search key field that is a combination of
multiple attributes
– A lexicographic ordering of these tuple values establishes an
order on this composite search key
 Partitioned Hashing
– For a key consisting of n components, the hash function is
designed to produce a result with n separate hash addresses
 Grid Files
– Construct a grid array with one linear scale (or dimension) for
each of the search attributes

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -48

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -49
Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Other Types of Indexes

 Hash Indexes
 Bitmap Indexes
 Function based Indexing

Elmasri/Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fourth Edition Slide 9 -50

Copyright © 2004 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe