deminix <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I was curious if a single page of the database was limited to at most one > record, aka can records be packed into a single page?
Multiple small records can fit on one page. Or a large record can span multiple pages. > > If it does pack records, then the purpose of the page size becomes less > obvious to me. It can certainly be used to match the size of the underlying > OS/hardware more efficiently, but could it serve another purpose? > The file is read and written a page at a time. If you have a large page size (32K, say) but only want to read or write a few bytes, you still have to do I/O on the whole 32K. This argues for smaller pages. On the other hand, there is a fixed memory space, disk space, and processing time overhead associated with each page. The smaller the pages, the more overhead for the same amount of data. This argues for larger pages. A 1K page works well on unix for most applications. But it is nice to have the flexibility to adjust the page size up or down for those cases where a different page size might give better performance. -- D. Richard Hipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
