The design and tuning of new access methods (AMs) for non-traditional data types
and application areas has always been more of a black art than a rigorous
discipline. The designer can only rely on intuition to come up with an effective
design; its evaluation and profiling require tedious instrumentation
of complex AM code and a host of hand-written scripts.
To address these issues, we developed amdb, a visual AM ``debugging'' tool to
support the AM design and implementation process. It is based on the GiST
( Generalized Search Tree)
framework for AM construction, which offers the
designer an abstracted view of a tree-structured AM and factors out the
mechanical aspects of an AM implementation, such as tree traversal, concurrency
control and recovery. Amdb is a visual analysis, debugging and profiling tool
for AMs that are written as extensions of
libgist,
a public-domain stand-alone C++ implementation of GiSTs.