Review - Context-Based Prefetch for Implementing Objects on Relations.

Michael J. Carey: Review - Context-Based Prefetch for Implementing Objects on Relations. ACM SIGMOD Digital Review 2: (2000)

Review

This is a very nice industrial/experiences type paper that describes the authors' experience in implementing persistent objects on top of an RDBMS and, in particular, how they obtained decent performance by utilizing a technique they call "context-based prefetching". My reaction to this paper was that context-based prefetching is a practical technique, described clearly in the paper, and I liked the fact that the technique's writeup is accompanied by some performance results. This paper solves a practical problem of relatively wide industrial interest (and growing importance, given that object databases just don't seem to be taking hold over relational or object-relational ones). The prefetching technique itself is quite simple, yet effective, and it appears to be applicable to ORDBMSs as well as RDBMSs. I appreciated the fact that it has been implemented in a real system, the Microsoft Repository, and was shown to have real value in terms of being readily applicable to the problems that arose there and providing the needed performance gains.

References

[1]: Philip A. Bernstein, Shankar Pal, David Shutt: Context-Based Prefetch for Implementing Objects on Relations. VLDB 1999: 327-338