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Persistent Memory: A Storage System for Object-Oriented Databases

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Part of the Topics in Information Systems book series (TINF)

Abstract

Object-oriented databases are needed to support database objects with a wide variety of types and structures. Object-oriented techniques, such as abstraction and inheritance mechanisms, which are widely used in symbolic processing, can be very useful in object-oriented databases. The advent of automatically managed, garbage-collected virtual memory was crucial to the development of today’s symbolic processing. No analogous capability has yet been developed in the domain of persistent objects managed by a file or database system. A persistent memory provides a storage system for long-term, reliable retention of objects with rich types and structures in virtual memory itself. Because no separate file system is assumed for long-term, reliable storage of objects, the system requires a crash recovery scheme at the level of virtual memory, which is a major contribution of the paper.

The persistent memory system is based on a uniform memory abstraction, which eliminates the distinction between transient objects (data structures) and persistent objects (files and databases), and therefore, allows the same set of powerful and flexible operations to be applied with equal efficiency on both transient and persistent objects from a programming language such as Lisp or Prolog. A persistent object manager implemented on top of the persistent memory manages named persistent objects with rich structure. It is expected that the persistent memory system will lead to significant simplifications in implementing applications such as object-oriented databases.

Keywords

Garbage Collection Virtual Memory Page Fault Dirty Page System Crash 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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