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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