Avoiding hot spots during ingest where ingest ordering must be preserved

Abstract

Techniques are described herein for achieving physically dispersed item-dispersal patterns in queue tables that are used as circular buffers in a FIFO system. The techniques achieve the physically dispersed item-dispersal patterns while retaining FIFO semantics, efficient data ingest, efficient data access, and low latency for both fixed and variable-size ingest data. Because consecutively inserted rows are written to physically dispersed locations on persistent storage, lock contention between concurrent ingest sessions is significantly reduced. Once a physically dispersed item-dispersal pattern is established for a first set of inserted rows, subsequent rows are added by overwriting the existing rows. The physical dispersal of the initial rows may be accomplished by setting values in a slot number column such that updates that are made in a sequence that is based on the slot number column exhibit a desired physical dispersal pattern.