A Decision Support Tool for distributed Database Design

The efficiency and effectiveness of a distributed database depend primarily on solving two interrelated design problems: data allocation, specifying what data to replicate and where to store it, and operating strategies, specifying where and how retrieval and update processes are performed. We develop a distributed database design approach that comprehensively addresses these problems, explicitly modeling their interdependencies for both retrieval and update processing. We extend earlier distributed database design models to include join order and data reduction by semijoin, in addition to data replication, copy identification, and join node selection. We demonstrate that join ordering and data reduction by semijoin are important distributed database design decisions that must be included in a distributed database design algorithm if it is to determine an overall optimal distributed database design.