Variable Length Records Management....

Hi, I am trying to find some information on managing variable length records on a low level within a database. By variable length, I mean records that can be from 1 byte to a few hundred MB (or more) in size.

I've seen a few techniques which may be applicable such as adapting a general file system block based design or stuffing multiple variable length (smaller) records into a larger (but small enough to quickly be able to reorganize) block.

However, there are a number of issues that I haven't seen well addressed in the literature I have seen such as freelist management for large scale databases. In addition, most of the literature covering this issue has been rather sketchy at best. I'm sure there is a reasonable number of papers on this somewhere -- just that I have missed them somehow.

Does anyone know of any books or papers that cover this in detail? It is amazing how much literature is on using databases rather than on actual low level database design. (Of course, it isn't like very many people program databases from scratch very often... )

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

-Art Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 18:30:22 CDT