The Effect of Index Partitioning Schemes on the Performance of Distributed Query Processing

The benefit of using indexes for processing coqjunctive queries in a database system is well known. The use of indexes in distributed database systems is equally justified. In a distributed database environment a relation may be horizontally partitioned across the nodes of the system and indexes may be created for the fragment of the relation that resides at each node. However, as an alternative, one might construct each index on the entire relation, i.e., global indexes, and then partition each index between the nodes. An approach is presented for processing such an index partitioning scheme in response to a coqjunctive range query. The performance of these schemes is evaluated in terms of the response time of a query and the utilization of processors, disk, and communication network while varying the number of nodes and query mix. Index remDistributed database system, query processing, indexing scheme, partitioned global index, partial index, coqjunctive queries, simulation, performance evaluation.