A new dynamic signature file method in parallel processing environment

The signature file method has widely been advocated as an efficient index scheme to handle new applications demanding a large amount of textual databases. Moreover, it has been recently extended to support multimedia data. In order to achieve good performance on handling the multimedia data, the signature file approach has been required to support parallel database processing. Therefore, in this paper we propose a horizontally-divided parallel signature file method (HPSF) using extendible hashing and frame-slicing techniques. In addition, we propose a heuristic processor allocation method so that we may assign a set of signatures into a given number of processors in a uniform way. To show the efficiency of HPSF, we evaluate the performance of HPSF in terms of retrieval time, storage overhead, and insertion time. Finally, we show from the performance results that HPSF outperforms the conventional parallel signature file methods on retrieval performance as well as a dynamic operating measure to combine both retrieval and insertion time.