The Design of XPRS

1.1. High Performance This paper presents an overview of the techniques we are using to build a DBMS at Berkeley that will simultaneously provide high performance and high availability in transaction processing environments, in applications with complex ad-hoc queries and in applications with large objects such as images or CAD layouts. We plan to achieve these goals using a general purpose DBMS and operating system and a shared memory multiprocessor. The hardware and software tactics which we are using to accomplish these goals are described in this paper and include a novel “fast path” feature, a special purpose concurrency control scheme, a twodimensional file system, exploitation of parallelism and a novel method to efficiently mirror disks. We strive for high performance in three different application areas: 1) transaction processing 2) complex ad-hoc queries 3) management of large objects