Adaptable pointer swizzling strategies in object bases

Four different approaches to optimizing the access to main memory resident persistent objects-techniques which are commonly referred to as pointer swizzling-are classified and evaluated. To speed up the access along inter-object references, the persistent pointers are transformed (swizzled) into main memory pointers (addresses). The pointer swizzling techniques allow the displacement of objects from the buffer before the end of an application, and the authors contrast them with the performance of an object manager using no pointer swizzling. The results of the quantitative evaluation prove that there is no one superior strategy for all application profiles. An adaptable system that uses the full range of pointer swizzling strategies is presented