Effects of update techniques on main memory database system performance

Update technique is an important issue related to database recovery. In a main memory database environment, transaction execution can be processed without any I/O, and all I/O operations involved are for recovery purposes. The efficiency of update techniques therefore has an important impact on the performance of main memory database systems. We compared the techniques of immediate and deferred update based on a database machine, MARS. The simulation results showed that immediate update outperforms deferred update unless system failure is a frequent occurrence.