Operating System Support for Database Management Revisited

Daniel Fellig, Olga Tikhonova

Abstract: In the early 1980s Michael Stonebraker wrote a paper titled "Operating System Support for Database Management", outlining where and how operating systems at the time failed to meet the needs of database management systems in terms of some typical services that operating systems provide to applications. Stonebraker points out these deficiencies in the areas of buffer pool management, file system, scheduling, process management, and interprocess communication, and consistency control. The examples drawn are mostly from UNIX and INGRES. This paper twenty years or so later, investigates the operating system support of one of these services - buffer pool management, provided to database management systems by a modern commodity operating system, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0.

Available as: Postscript
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