• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.109-118
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• 2007

Recently, flash memory is used to store data in mobile computing devices such as PDAs, SmartCards, mobile phones and MP3 players. These devices need index structures like the B-tree to efficiently support some operations like insertion, deletion and search. The BFTL(B-tree Flash Translation Layer) technique was first introduced which is for implementing the B-tree on flash memory. Flash memory has characteristics that a write operation is more costly than a read operation and an overwrite operation is impossible. Therefore, the BFTL method focuses on minimizing the number of write operations resulting from building the B-tree. However, we indicate in this paper that there are many rooms of improving the performance of the I/O cost in building the B-tree using this method and it is not practical since it increases highly the usage of the SRAM memory storage. In this paper, we propose a BOF(the B-tree On Flash memory) approach for implementing the B-tree on flash memory efficiently. The core of this approach is to store index units belonging to the same B-tree node to the same sector on flash memory in case of the replacement of the buffer used to build the B-tree. In this paper, we show that our BOF technique outperforms the BFTL or other techniques.