Rindex : Ytelsestest av plattform for indekshåndtering i RAM

Abstract

The topic for this thesis is index management in Database management Systems (DBMS).

The thesis is split in two related parts. The first part documents the design and implementation of Rindex, a platform whose goal is to support research on index management in RAM. This work (both the programing and the writing) was done in collaboration with Tomas Are Haavet.

The idea behind the project is to keep all indexes but the primary ones entirely in main memory, and to create indexes on all attributes whose value domain is strictly ordered. Another fundamental concept is that instead of applying the query operators to relations, we apply them to indexes. In it's current implementation, Rindex is only concerned with queries, and only a subset of the query language from SQL is implemented.

The second part first establishes a methodology for evaluating Rindex, and then uses this methodology for an actual evaluation. Here Rindex is evaluated by doing a comparative analysis against Oracle. The analysis is done by measuring the execution time of the two platforms for a set of selected queries. The queries are partitioned into five test cases, that delves into the basic operations: joins, selections and projections, but also index generation.

The platform is far too immature, so an absolute conclusion can not be done. However the tests all indicate that there might be significant performance gains by managing indexes the ``Rindex way''.