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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2229–2231Cite as

Memory Locality

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Synonyms

Locality of reference; Locality principle; Principle of locality

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...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Ailamaki AG, DeWitt DJ, Hill MD, Skounakis M. Weaving relations for cache performance. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 2001. p. 169–180.

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  2. Denning PJ. The working set model for program behaviour. Commun ACM. 1968;11(5):323–33.

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  3. Denning PJ. The locality principle. Commun ACM. 2005;48(7):19–24.

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  4. Manegold S, Boncz PA, Kersten ML. Optimizing main-memory join on modern hardware. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng. July 2002;14(4):709–30.

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  5. Shatdal A, Kant C, Naughton J. Cache conscious algorithms for relational query processing. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1994. p. 510–12.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Stefan Manegold

Authors
  1. Stefan Manegold
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefan Manegold .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

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Manegold, S. (2018). Memory Locality. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_686

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