Efficient Management of Persistent Knowledge

Although computer speed has steadily increased and memory is getting cheaper, the need for storage managers to deal efficiently with applications that cannot be held into main memory is vital. Dealing with large quantities of clauses implies the use of persistent knowledge and thus, indexing methods are essential to access efficiently the subset of clauses relevant to answering a query. We introduce PerKMan, a storage manager that uses G-trees, and aims at efficient manipulation of large amounts of persistent knowledge. PerKMan may be connected to Prolog systems that offer an external C language interface. As well as the fact that the storage manager allows different arguments of a predicate to share a common index dimension in a novel manner, it indexes rules and facts in the same manner. PerKMan handles compound terms efficiently and its data structures adapt their shape to large dynamic volumes of clauses, no matter what the distribution. The storage manager achieves fast clause retrieval and reasonable use of disk space.