A logging approach on B + -tree index for flash-based DBMS

Flash memory, especially NAND flash memory, is being rapidly deployed as data storage for mobile devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras and PDA's. With its capacity increasing and price dropping, Flash memory has been installed in many portable computers instead of magnetic disk for its light weight, small size, physical stability and low power consumption. We may expect that Flash memory will finally take the place of magnetic disk in the next few years. It is possible for us to consider running a database system on the flash computing platforms. Therefore, this requires an efficient index structure to locate a particular item quickly from a huge amount of database records. However, disk-based database index can not be used on flash memory directly because of different characteristics between flash memory and magnetic disk. In this paper, we propose a logging approach on B+-tree index for flash-based DBMS. This new approach makes use of the characteristics of flash memory effectively to acquire more benefits from using traditional database index technology on flash memory.