SUPER-RECORDS

A method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for improving throughput and reducing latency for a computer database system with asynchronous updates, by taking advantage of information about relationships between records provided by the user. This information takes the form of rules that can be used to group a number of records that are often accessed together into a super-record, which the database system stores as a single unit, Updates to different records or parts of records within a super-record can be handled in a single atomic read-modify-write cycle, taking advantage of the asynchronous nature of updates to delay them so they can be combined with others, and thereby reducing the number of disk seeks required to perform the updates, When a single record or part of a record is requested to be read by the application, the entire super-record can be read in at very little extra cost, and the entire super-record loaded into a fast random-access cache in order to service subsequent reads to other data within the super-record without needing to read from the disk.