Abstract: A method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for a computer implemented recover/build index system. The recover/build index system builds a database index for a database file by scanning partitions of the database file in parallel to retrieve key values and their associated record identifier (rid) values. The recover/build index system then sorts the scanned key/rid values for each partition in parallel. Next, the recover/build index system performs one or more merges on the sorted key/rid values from all of the partitions to generate a single key/rid value stream. Finally, the recover/build index system builds the index using the single key/rid value stream.

Abstract: Page management mechanisms provide candidates for page stealing and prefetching from a main storage data cache of shared data when the jobs sharing the data are accessing it in a sequential manner. Pages are stolen behind the first reader in the cache, and thereafter at locations least likely to be soon re-referenced by trailing readers. A "clustering" of readers may be promoted to reduce I/O contention. Prefetching is carried out so that the pages most likely to be soon referenced by one of the readers are brought into the cache.