Suppose you need to sort a relation of 40 gigabytes, with 4 kilobyte blocks, using a memory size of 40 megabytes. Suppose the cost of a seek is 5 milliseconds, while the disk transfer rate is 40 megabytes per second.
a. Find the cost of sorting the relation, in seconds, with bb = 1 and with bb = 100.
b. In each case, how many merge passes are required?
c. Suppose a flash storage device is used instead of a disk, and it has a seek time of 1 microsecond, and a transfer rate of 40 megabytes per second. Recompute the cost of sorting the relation, in seconds, with bb = 1 and with bb = 100, in this setting.