Daytona and the fourth-generation language Cymbal
SIGMOD '99 Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
On the duality of operating system structures
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
Gecko: tracking a very large billing system
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
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There is a growing need for very large databases which are not practical to implement with conventional relational database technology. These databases are characterized by huge size and frequent large updates; they do not require traditional database transactions, instead the atomicity of bulk updates can be guaranteed outside of the database. Given the I/O and CPU resources available on modern computer systems, it is possible to build these huge databases using simple flat files and simply scanning all the data when doing queries. This paper describes Gecko, a system for tracking the state of every call in a very large billing system, which uses sorted flat files to implement a database of about 60G records occupying 2.6TB. We focus on the performance issues, particularly with regard to job management, I/O management and data distribution, and on the tools we built to run the system.