The Oracle Universal Server Buffer Manager

The buffer manager is integral to the performance, scalability, and reliability of Oracle’s Universal Dam Server, a high performance object-relational database manager that provides robust data-management services for a variety of applications and tools. The rich functionality of the Universal Data Server poses special challenges to the design of the buffer manager. Buffer management algorithms must be scalable and efficient across a broad spectrum of OLTP, decision support, and multimedia workloads which impose very different concurrency, throughput and bandwidth requirements. The need for portability across a wide range of platforms further complicates buffer management; the database server must run efficiently with buffer pool sizes ranging from 50 buffers to several million buffers and on a wide variety of architectures including uniprocessors, shared-disk clusters, messagepassing MPP systems, and shared-memory muhiprocessors.