Three new buffering and read- ahead strategies are proposed, called equal buffering, extended forecasting and clustering. They exploit the fact that virtually all modern disks perform caching and sequential read- ahead.
Clustering exploits any temporal skew in input runs to further reduce the number of seeks.
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by the permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. Query Evaluation Techniques for Large Databases. Merging Sorted Runs Using Large Main Memory. Speeding up External Mergesort.