SpringerLink
Log in

Memory Locality

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 216 Accesses

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.

    ...

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

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Recommended Reading

  1. Ailamaki AG, DeWitt DJ, Hill MD, Skounakis M. Weaving relations for cache performance. In: Proceedings of 27th international conference on very large data bases. 2001. p. 169–180.

    Google Scholar 

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

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  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.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Shatdal A, Kant C, Naughton J. Cache conscious algorithms for relational query processing. In: Proceedings of 20th international conference on very large data bases. 1994. p. 510–12.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Stefan Manegold

Authors
  1. Stefan Manegold
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefan Manegold .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

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

    Ling Liu

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

    M. Tamer Özsu

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media LLC

About this entry

Cite this entry

Manegold, S. (2016). Memory Locality. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_686-2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_686-2

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation