A study of database buffer management approaches: towards the development of a data mining based strategy

The problem of buffer management in database systems is concerned with efficient main memory allocation and replacement for answering database queries. The goal is to reduce disk operations and enhance the system throughput by utilizing a dedicated buffer pool for caching database pages. This paper provides an in-depth study of current buffer management techniques for database systems. Through surveying existing work, we propose a data mining based approach to buffer management. Different from previous approaches where limited knowledge of user access patterns is used, the proposed approach discovers knowledge from database access sequences and uses it to guide buffer management. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, we construct a simulation model and conduct a series of experiments. The results show that with the help of the discovered knowledge, the buffer hit ratio can be improved significantly