• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
• /
• v.36 no.6
• /
• pp.521-531
• /
• 2009

Flash memory has physical characteristics different from hard disk where two costs of a read and write operations differ each other and an overwrite on flash memory is impossible to be done. In order to solve these restrictions with software, storage systems equipped with flash memory deploy FTL(Flash Translation Layer) software. Several FTL algorithms have been suggested so far and most of them prefer sequential write pattern to random write pattern. In this paper, we provide a new technique to efficiently store and maintain the B-tree index on flash memory. The operations like inserts, deletes, updates of keys for the B-tree generate random writes rather than sequential writes on flash memory, leading to inefficiency to the B-tree maintenance. In our technique, we convert random writes generated by the B-tree into sequential writes and then store them to the write-buffer on flash memory. If the buffer is full later, some sequential writes in the buffer will be issued to FTL. Our diverse experimental results show that our technique outperforms the existing ones with respect to the I/O cost of flash memory.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
• /
• v.34 no.2
• /
• pp.109-118
• /
• 2007

Recently, flash memory is used to store data in mobile computing devices such as PDAs, SmartCards, mobile phones and MP3 players. These devices need index structures like the B-tree to efficiently support some operations like insertion, deletion and search. The BFTL(B-tree Flash Translation Layer) technique was first introduced which is for implementing the B-tree on flash memory. Flash memory has characteristics that a write operation is more costly than a read operation and an overwrite operation is impossible. Therefore, the BFTL method focuses on minimizing the number of write operations resulting from building the B-tree. However, we indicate in this paper that there are many rooms of improving the performance of the I/O cost in building the B-tree using this method and it is not practical since it increases highly the usage of the SRAM memory storage. In this paper, we propose a BOF(the B-tree On Flash memory) approach for implementing the B-tree on flash memory efficiently. The core of this approach is to store index units belonging to the same B-tree node to the same sector on flash memory in case of the replacement of the buffer used to build the B-tree. In this paper, we show that our BOF technique outperforms the BFTL or other techniques.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
• /
• v.8 no.3
• /
• pp.12-24
• /
• 2016

Recently, as the price per bit is decreasing at a fast rate, flash memory is considered to be used as primary storage of large-scale database systems. Although flash memory shows off its high speeds of page reads, however, it has a problem of noticeable performance degradation in the presence of increasing update workloads. When updates are requested for pages with random page IDs, in particular, the shortcoming of flash tends to impair significantly the overall performance of a flash-based database system. Therefore, it is important to have a way to efficiently update the B+-tree, when it is stored in flash storage. This is because most of updates in the B+-tree arise at leaf nodes, whose page IDs are in random. In this light, we propose a new flash B+-tree that stores up-to-date versions of leaf nodes in sibling-leaf blocks (SLBs), while updating them. The use of SLBs improves the update performance of B-trees and provides the mechanism for fast key range searches. To verify the performance advantages of the proposed flash B+-tree, we developed a mathematical performance evaluation model that is suited for assessing B-tree operations. The performance comparisons from it show that the proposed flash B+-tree provides faster range searches and reduces more than 50% of update costs.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
• /
• v.18D no.3
• /
• pp.157-168
• /
• 2011

Recently flash memory has been being utilized as a main storage device in mobile devices, and flashSSDs are getting popularity as a major storage device in laptop and desktop computers, and even in enterprise-level server machines. Unlike HDDs, on flash memory, the overwrite operation is not able to be performed unless it is preceded by the erase operation to the same block. To address this, FTL(Flash memory Translation Layer) is employed on flash memory. Even though the modified data block is overwritten to the same logical address, FTL writes the updated data block to the different physical address from the previous one, mapping the logical address to the new physical address. This enables flash memory to avoid the high block-erase cost. A flashSSD has an array of NAND flash memory packages so it can access one or more flash memory packages in parallel at once. To take advantage of the internal parallelism of flashSSDs, it is beneficial for DBMSs to request I/O operations on sequential logical addresses. However, the B-tree structure, which is a representative index scheme of current relational DBMSs, produces excessive I/O operations in random order when its node structures are updated. Therefore, the original b-tree is not favorable to SSD. In this paper, we propose AS(Always Sequential) B-tree that writes the updated node contiguously to the previously written node in the logical address for every update operation. In the experiments, AS B-tree enhanced 21% of B-tree's insertion performance.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
• /
• v.15A no.6
• /
• pp.325-334
• /
• 2008

Flash memory is widely used as a storage medium for mobile devices such as cell phones, MP3 players, PDA's due to its tiny size, low power consumption and shock resistant characteristics. Additionally, some computer manufacturers try to replace hard-disk drives used in Laptops or personal computers with flash memory. More recently, there are some literatures on developing a flash memory-aware $B^+$-tree index for an efficient key-based search in the flash memory storage system. They focus on minimizing the number of "overwrites" resulting from inserting or deleting a sequence of key values to/from the $B^+$-tree. However, in addition to this factor, the size of a physical page allocated to a node can affect the maintenance cost of the $B^+$-tree. In this paper, with diverse experiments, we compare and analyze the costs of construction and search of the $B^+$-tree and the space requirement on flash memory as the node size increases. We also provide sorting-based or non-sorting-based algorithms to be used when inserting a key value into the node and suggest an header structure of the index node for searching a given key inside it efficiently.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.13 no.9
• /
• pp.28-38
• /
• 2013

During the past decades, the B+-tree has been most widely used as an index file structure for disk-resident databases. For the disk based B+-tree, a node update can be cheaply performed just by modifying its associated disk page in place. However, in case that the B+-tree is stored on flash memory, the traditional algorithms of the B+-tree come to be useless due to the prohibitive cost of in-place updates on flash memory. For this reason, the earlier schemes for flash memory B+-trees usually take an approach that saves B+-tree changes from real-time updates into extra temporary storage. Although that approach can easily prevent frequent in-place updates in the B+-tree, it can suffer from a waste of storage space and prolonged search times. Particularly, it is not allowable to process range searches on the leaf node level. To resolve such problems, we devise a new scheme in which the leaf nodes and their parent node are stored together in a single flash block, called the p-node block.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
• /
• v.14D no.7
• /
• pp.719-726
• /
• 2007

Recently, NAND flash memory has been used for a storage device in various mobile computing devices such as MP3 players, mobile phones and laptops because of its shock-resistant, low-power consumption, and none-volatile properties. However, due to the very distinct characteristics of flash memory, disk based systems and applications may result in severe performance degradation when directly adopting them on flash memory storage systems. Especially, when a B-tree is constructed, intensive overwrite operations may be caused by record inserting, deleting, and its reorganizing, This could result in severe performance degradation on NAND flash memory. In this paper, we propose an efficient buffer management scheme, called IBSF, which eliminates redundant index units in the index buffer and then delays the time that the index buffer is filled up. Consequently, IBSF significantly reduces the number of write operations to a flash memory when constructing a B-tree. We also show that IBSF yields a better performance on a flash memory by comparing it to the related technique called BFTL through various experiments.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.20 no.6
• /
• pp.1-11
• /
• 2015

Recently, NAND flash memories are used for storage devices because of fast access speed and low-power. However, applications of FTL on low power computing devices lead to heavy workloads which result in a memory requirement and an implementation overhead. Consequently, studies of B+-Tree on embedded devices without the FTL have been proposed. The studies of B+-Tree are optimized for performance of inserting and updating records, considering to disadvantages of the NAND flash memory that it can not support in-place update. However, if a general garbage collection method is applied to the previous studies of B+-Tree, a performance of the B+-Tree is reduced, because it generates a rearrangement of the B+-Tree by changing of page positions on the NAND flash memory. Therefor, we propose a novel garbage collection method which can apply to the B+-Tree based on the NAND flash memory without the FTL. The proposed garbage collection method does not generate a rearrangement of the B+-Tree by using a block information table and a proxy block. We implemented the B+-Tree and ${\mu}$-Tree with the proposed garbage collection on physical devices with the NAND flash memory. In experiment results, the proposed garbage collection scheme compared to greedy algorithm garbage collection scheme increased the number of inserted keys by up to about 73% on B+-Tree and decreased elapsed time of garbage collection by up to about 39% on ${\mu}$-Tree.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.16 no.8
• /
• pp.706-716
• /
• 2016

Because of efficient space utilization and fast key search times, B-trees have been widely accepted for the use of indexes in HDD-based DBMSs. However, when the B-ree is stored in flash memory, its costly operations of node updates may impair the performance of a DBMS. This is because the random updates in B-tree's leaf nodes could tremendously enlarge I/O costs for the garbage collecting actions of flash storage. To solve the problem, we make all the parents of leaf nodes the virtual nodes, which are not stored physically. Rather than, those nodes are dynamically generated and buffered by referring to their child nodes, at their access times during key searching. By performing node updates and tree reconstruction within a single flash block, our proposed B-tree can reduce the I/O costs for garbage collection and update operations in flash. Moreover, our scheme provides the better performance of key searches, compared with earlier flash-based B-trees. Through a mathematical performance model, we verify the performance advantages of the proposed flash B-tree.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 2006.04a
• /
• pp.267-269
• /
• 2006

Recently, flash memories are one of best media to support portable computer's storages in mobile computing environment. The features of non-volatility, low power consumption, and fast access time for read operations are sufficient grounds to support flash memory as major database storage components of portable computers. However, we need to improve traditional Indexing scheme such as B-Tree due to the relatively slow characteristics of flash operation as compared to RAM memory. In order to achieve this goal, we devise a new indexing scheme called F-Tree. F-Tree improves tree operation performance by compressing pointers and keys in tree nodes and rewriting the nodes without a slow erase operation in node insert/delete processes.