RDBMS – AI2101 (AY : 2023-24)

Week 11 Storage Structure

and Indexing
Storage Structure and Indexing
Outlines
• File Organization
• Indexing
• Classification of Indexing

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File Organization
• Even though the database shows us data in the form of relations we
must understand that it is just a logical representation.
• Finally, all the data needs to be stored on the hard disk as files.
• It is very important in performance point of view that this
organization should allow the database software to access data
quickly and in an efficient way.

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Files on Disk
• How to store the records on hard disk?
• You can rely on operating systems. But, the way we access normal data is totally
different from the way we access database data.
• In database, we might not require the whole file, just one or two records are
required. So, we let DBMS use its very own organization.
• Database ====> Files / Block ====> Record ====> Fields
• We divide each table in block & then store it in hard disk.
• If the size of a block is 1024 byte and 1 record is of size 4 byte then how many
records in one block you can save?
• 1024 / 4 =256 i.e; blocking factor is the average number of record per block.

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Fixed Length v/s Variable Length Records
• Consider a list of mobile numbers where each number is exactly 10
digits long.
• Retrieving number will be simple here because we can read 10
characters at a time.
• But consider a list of names. How do we know the size of names?
They can vary.
• To make matters more complex we can have records of certain
number of fixed length entries and some variable length entries.

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Records on Disk in Blocks
• Spanned: It allows partial part of record to be stored in a block.
R1 R2 R3 R4 R4 R5 R6 R7

• Advantages : no wastage of memory.

• Disadvantage: No. of block access will increase to access a record.
• Unspanned: No record can be stored in more than one block.
R1 R2 R3 R4 R5 R6 R7 ||||

• Advantages : No. of block access will be less to access a record.

• Disadvantage: no wastage of memory.

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Records on Disk in Files
• Ordered File Organization: All records in a file are ordered on some
search key value.
• Searching can be done in binary search mode.
• Advantage: Searching can be efficient. Only when we search on search key
value. If we search on other attribute, then no advantage.
• Disadvantage: Insertion will be expensive due to reorganization of the entire file.
• Un-Ordered File Organization: All records in a file are inserted wherever
the place is available (usually at the end of file).
• Searching can be done in linear search mode.
• Advantage: Insertion of a record is efficient.
• Disadvantage: Searching is very inefficient.
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Indexing
• Indexing mechanisms used to speed up access to desired data. E.g., author
catalog in library
• Search Key - attribute or set of attributes used to look up records in a file.
• An index file consists of records (called index entries) of the form
search-key Block -pointer
• Index files are typically much smaller than the original file
• Two basic kinds of indices:
• Ordered indices: search keys are stored in sorted order
• Hash indices: search keys are distributed uniformly across “buckets” using a
“hash function”.

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Classification of Indexing
Non-Key/Candidate Key +
Primary key + Unordered
Ordered

Non-Key +
ordered

These all are single level indexing.

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Primary Indexing
• Data file is ordered on primary key & we will build index on primary
key.
• A primary index is an ordered file whose records are of fixed length
with two fields. First field is same as primary key of data file and
second field is a pointer to the data block where key is available.
• Index is created for the first record of each block is known as block
anchors.

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Dense Indexing
• Dense index — Index record appears for every search-key value in the
file.

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Sparse Indexing
• Sparse Index: contains index records for only some search-key values.
• Applicable when records are sequentially ordered on search-key

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Secondary Indexing
• Secondary Index provides a
secondary means of accessing a file
for which primary access already
exist.
• It will be dense index. i.e., index will
be created for every record in a file.
• Secondary Index does not have any
impact on how the rows are actually
organized in data blocks.
• They can be in any order. The only
ordering is w.r.t the index key in index
blocks.
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Clustering Indexing
• Clustered Indexing is used when there are multiple related records
found at one place.
• It is defined on ordered data. The important thing to note here is that
the index table of clustered indexing is created using non-key values
which may or may not be unique.
• To achieve faster retrieval, we group columns having similar
characteristics.
• The indexes are created using these groups and this process is known
as Clustering Index.

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Clustering Indexing

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