Houjun Liu

DBMS Storage Format

Database Page

each Database Page is given a unique identifier; a page ID could be unique per DBMS, per DB, or per table—page IDs is indirection to physical location.

  • a Database Page is a fixed-size block of data
    • tuples
    • meta-data
    • indicies
    • log records
  • most systems do not mix page types (don’t mix different tables, do not mix different types, etc.)
  • some systems require a page to be self contained (no pointers, etc.) — for fault tolerance

Whoops, we accidentally overloaded a word

  • Hardware Page (4kb, i.e. a block on the physical disk)
  • OS Page (usually a block, notionally different for now but abstracted, 2mb, 1gb)
  • Database Page

each Database Page is automatically read/written