Clustering and Non-clustering Effects in Flash Memory Databases

Flash memory has its unique characteristics: the write operation is much more costly than the read operation, and in-place updating is not allowed. In this paper, we analyze how these characteristics affect the performance of clustering and non-clustering in record management, and shows that non-clustering is more suitable in flash memory environment, which does not hold in disk environment. Also, we discuss the problems of the existing non-clustering method, and identify design factors to be considered with record management method in flash memory environment.