Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1713–1714Cite as

Memory Locality

  • Reference work entry

  • 139 Accesses

Synonyms

Principle of locality; Locality principle; Locality of reference

Definition

Locality refers to the phenomenon that computer programs — or computational processes in general — do not access all of their data items uniformly and independently, but rather in a clustered and/or dependent/correlated manner. Some data items are accessed more often than others, repeated accesses to the same data item occur in bursts, and related items are usually accessed together, concurrently or within a short time interval.

There are two types of locality:

  1. 1.

    Temporal locality means that accesses to the same data item are grouped in time, i.e., multiple accesses to the same data item occur in rather short time intervals compared to rather long time periods where the same data item is not accessed. Hence, temporal locality is the concept that a data item that is referenced by a program at one point in time will be referenced again sometime in the near future.

  2. 2.

    Spatial localitymeans that data...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   2,500.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Recommended Reading

  1. Ailamaki A.G., DeWitt D.J., Hill M.D., and Skounakis M. Weaving relations for cache performance. In Proc. 27th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 2001, pp. 169–180.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Denning P.J. The working set model for program behaviour. Commun. ACM, 11(5):323–333, 1968.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Denning P.J. The locality principle. Commun. ACM, 48(7):19–24, 2005.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Manegold S., Boncz P.A., and Kersten M.L. Optimizing main-memory join on modern hardware. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., 14(4):709–730, July 2002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Shatdal A., Kant C., and Naughton J. Cache conscious algorithms for relational query processing. In Proc. 20th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 1994, pp. 510–512.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

    Authors
    1. Stefan Manegold
      View author publications

      You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

    Editor information

    Editors and Affiliations

    1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

      LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

    2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

      M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

    Rights and permissions

    Reprints and permissions

    Copyright information

    © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

    About this entry

    Cite this entry

    Manegold, S. (2009). Memory Locality. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_686

    Download citation

    Publish with us

    Policies and ethics

    Search

    Navigation