A pipeline and parallel architecture for supporting database management systems

Abstract

A pipeline and parallel architecture is described and analyzed for efficient support of database management systems. The main feature of the architecture is a RAM consisting of two bit-arrays, one word-array, and one memory bank. Through the use of the RAM, cross referencing involved in the join and project operations can be removed, without the need for sorting. Further performance improvements are achieved by using parallelism in tuple cancatenation and tuple comparison via a set of servers. The architecuture is quite suitable for a wide range of database applications, especially those requiring a high percentage of cross referencing. A hardware simulator was developed for determining the optimal number of servers for different applications.