Abstract:  In 1981, Stonebraker wrote a scathing criticism of OS support for databases and how lacking it was. This paper is pointed to as why operating systems fail to adequately support databases. Since it is 20 years old, it motivated us to revisit OS support for databases. In this project, based on Stonebraker's framework, we reexamined two modern operating systems, Solaris and Windows NT, to see how well they would support databases in the modern world. We discuss buffer pool management, file system support, scheduling and process, and concurrency control in Solaris and Windows NT. Our conclusion is that both Solaris and NT offer better services in most aspects mentioned by Stonebraker's paper, providing a suitable environment for running a reliable, multiuser database system. We also discuss some features that are not mentioned by Stonebraker's paper, but are of special interests to and are used in DBMSs today.

Available as: Postscript,  testing programs