Teaching an OLTP database kernel advanced datawarehousing techniques

Most, if not all, of the major commercial database products available today were written more than 10 years ago. Their internal designs have always been heavily optimized for OLTP applications. Over the last couple of years as DSS and data warehousing have become more important, database companies have attempted to increase their performance with DSS-type applications. Most of their attempts have been in the form of added features like parallel table scans and simple bitmap indexing techniques. These were chosen because they could be quickly implemented (1-2 years), giving some level of increased query performance. The paper contends that the real performance gains for the DSS application have not yet been realized. The performance gains for DSS will not come from parallel table scans, but from major changes to the low level database storage management used by OLTP systems. One Sybase product, Sybase-IQ has pioneered some of these new techniques. The paper discusses a few of these techniques and how they could be integrated into an existing OLTP database kernel