Flash-based logging for database updates

Flash Memories (FM) are gaining popularity because they are purely digital storage device, they do not have any mechanical latency, they are highly portable, and they are easy to use for accessing data especially for mobile units such as laptops, PDA, etc. For these reasons they have a much diversified application domain. Many vendors are replacing conventional Disk-Based memory with FM. With recent advancements in FM technology, they may soon be able to replace conventional disk drive for mobile database processing, at least for lightweight tasks. Although FMs are faster than conventional magnetic discs, there are still many issues to solve to improve their performance specifically the writing speed. In this paper we present a software solution to improve its performance for database activities. We refer to our scheme as “Flash-Based Logging for Database Updates.” The scheme optimizes the use of costly writing/erasing operations of FMs using log based delayed update techniques. We show that our scheme reduces the randomness of read/write queries by grouping techniques. We argue that our scheme has a potential of achieving significant performance gain in mobile database processing.