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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2164Cite as

Main Memory DBMS

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Synonyms

In-memory DBMS; MMDBMS

Definition

A main memory database system is a DBMS that primarily relies on main memory for computer data storage. In contrast, conventional database management systems typically employ hard disk based persistent storage.

Key Points

The main advantage of MMDBMS over normal DBMS technology is superior performance, as I/O cost is no more a performance cost factor. With I/O as main optimization focus eliminated, the architecture of main memory database systems typically aims at optimizing CPU cost and CPU cache usage, leading to different data layout strategies (avoiding complex tuple representations) as well as indexing structures (e.g., B-trees with lower-fan-outs with nodes of one or a few CPU cache lines).

While built on top of volatile storage, most MMDB products offer ACID properties, via the following mechanisms: (i) Transaction Logging, which records changes to the database in a journal file and facilitates automatic recovery of an in-memory...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Bohannon P, Lieuwen DF, Rastogi R, Silberschatz A, Seshadri S, Sudarshan S. The architecture of the dalí main-memory storage manager. Multimedia Tools Appl. 1997;4(2):115–51.

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  2. Boncz PA, Kersten ML. MIL primitives for querying a fragmented world. VLDB J. 1999;8(2):101–19.

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  3. DeWitt DJ, Katz RH, Olken F, Shapiro LD, Stonebraker M, Wood DA. Implementation techniques for main memory database systems. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1984. p. 1–8.

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  4. Hvasshovd S-O, Torbjørnsen Ø, Bratsberg SE, Holager P. The ClustRa telecom database: high availability, high throughput, and real-time response. In: Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1995. p. 469–77.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter Boncz

Authors
  1. Peter Boncz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Boncz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Informatique et Communications, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Anastasia Ailamaki

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Boncz, P. (2018). Main Memory DBMS. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_655

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