Pervasive PSQL Xtreme I/O: Delivering Performance for 32-Bit Applications

Applications are often limited by their underlying hardware and operating systems. For example, disk-intensive applications such as databases may be limited by the speed of the underlying storage hardware (the RAM-DISK gap). Access to the storage subsystem is far slower than access to random access memory.

A typical method of improving application performance is to add more memory to the system; this approach works but is limited by the operating system. Another approach is to install general purpose caching products; however, these products tend to cache everything, and are not designed for a specific application. The last approach is to run the database application on a 64-bit version of Windows. Although this may enable the application to address more than 2GB of memory, it leaves the application constrained by the performance and I/O of the operating system.

This paper introduces a more effective solution: Pervasive PSQL Xtreme I/O system accelerator, designed to boost the performance of Pervasive PSQL's database applications. The solution is implemented as a device driver for 32-bit (x86) versions of Microsoft Windows with a minimum of 2GB of random access memory (RAM).