Multikey index support for tuple sets on parallel mass storage systems

The development and evaluation of a tuple set manager (TSM) based on multikey index data structures is a main part of the PARABASE project at the University of Vienna. The TSM provides access to parallel mass storage systems using tuple sets instead of conventional files as the central data structure for application programs. A proof-of-concept prototype TSM is already implemented and operational on an iPSC/2. It supports tuple insert and delete operations as well as exact match, partial match, and range queries at system call level. Available results are from this prototype on the one hand and from various performance evaluation figures. The evaluation results demonstrate the performance gain achieved by the implementation of the tuple set management concept on a parallel mass storage system.