Up: Disk Storage [Contents][Index]
Data blocks are writen on the disk store contiguously. When the next write would overwrite used space, a new free space is searched and used.
Subject to various and conflicting disk utilization goals (maximizing contiguous write, maximizing space use, etc), the largest free space will be picked.
Applications may set the minimum size for the picked free spaces. Setting the limit to a large value may result in poor disk utilization (large files for little data). One class of applications that are likely to see benefits from doing it are those that write and read large runs of sorted data. For such use patterns, the increase in disk use may be minimal, while the database speed may improve significantly on spinning disks.