Sequential access
Sequential access is a term describing a group of elements (such as data in a memory array or a disk file or on magnetic-tape data storage) being accessed in a predetermined, ordered sequence. It is the opposite of random access, the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence as easily and efficiently as any other at any time.
Sequential access is sometimes the only way of accessing the data, for example if it is on a tape. It may also be the access method of choice, for example if all that is wanted is to process a sequence of data elements in order.[1]
Definition
There is no consistent definition in computer science of sequential access or sequentiality.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] In fact, different sequentiality definitions can lead to different sequentiality quantification results. In spatial dimension, request size, stride distance, backward accesses, re-accesses can affect sequentiality. For temporal sequentiality, characteristics such as multi-stream and inter-arrival time threshold has impact on the definition of sequentiality.[10]
In
See also
References
- ^ Random and Sequential Data Access, Microsoft TechNet
- ^ Irfan Ahmad, Easy and Efficient Disk I/O Workload Characterization in VMware ESX Server, IISWC, 2007.
- ^ Eric Anderson, Capture, Conversion, and Analysis of an Intense NFS Workload, FAST, 2009.
- ^ Yanpei Chen et al. Design Implications for Enterprise Storage Systems via Multi-dimensional Trace Analysis. SOSP. 2011
- ^ Andrew Leung et al. Measurement and Analysis of Large-scale Network File System Workloads. USENIX ATC. 2008
- ^ Frank Schmuck and Roger Haskin, GPFS: A Shared-Disk File System for Large Computing Clusters, FAST. 2002
- ^ Alan Smith. Sequentiality and Prefetching in Database Systems. ACM TOS
- ^ Hyong Shim et al. Characterization of Incremental Data Changes for Efficient Data Protection. USENIX ATC. 2013.
- ^ Avishay Traeger et al. A Nine Year Study of File System and Storage Benchmarking. ACM TOS. 2007.
- ^ Cheng Li et al. Assert(!Defined(Sequential I/O)). HotStorage. 2014