This book provides basic knowledge about main memory management in relational databases as it is needed to support large-scale applications processed completely in memory. In business operations, real-time predictability and high speed is a must. Hence every opportunity must be exploited to improve performance, including reducing dependency on the hard disk, adding more memory to make more data resident in the memory, and even deploying an in-memory system where all data can be kept in memory. The book provides one chapter for each of the main related topics, i.e. the memory system, memory management, virtual memory, and databases and their memory systems, and it is complemented by a short survey of six commercial systems: TimesTen, MySQL, VoltDB, Hekaton, HyPer/ScyPer, and SAP HANA.

In this book, the interrupt handling models used by several operating systems are introduced and compared. We begin with an analysis of the classical interrupt management model used by Unix, followed by the schemes used by modern networked environments. We highlight the key challenges of each of these models and how these have been solved by modern operating systems and the research community. Then we analyze the architectures used for general purpose and embedded real-time operating systems.