Chapter 7. The Role of the Buffer Cache
Although disk I/O is central to the operation of relational database systems, databases go to considerable lengths to avoid it. The reason has to do with disk access times. Access to CPU cache is significantly faster than access to main memory, which in turn is significantly faster than access to disk. So databases work more effectively with data that is a memory access away from the CPU, rather than a disk access away.
When a database operation needs a database block that is located on disk, the operation typically stalls while the page is read into memory. When data is written to the log file, the logger process stalls until the write is completed. The only database disk activity that does not routinely ...
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