Last time, I introduced the notion of strict and lenient
updates. Now it’s time to see what the performance
characteristics are of each.
Just to rehash, we are focusing on the storage engine (a la
MySQL) level, and we are looking at a database on a single
disk—the one we are using for illustration is the 1TB Hitachi
Deskstar 7K1000. It has a disk seek time 14ms and transfer
rate of around 69MB/s [See tomshardware.com] We will insert and
delete random pairs, each 8 bytes. So that’s 62.5 billion
pairs to fill the disk.
Strict Updates
These are the easier update types to analyze. Please review
the definition of strict updates from the last blog entry.
Now notice that each insertion or deletion requires a point
query. For example, during an insertion, in order to
determine if there’s already a row with a particular key value in
the database, one must look up that key. In order …
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