An adaptable vertical partitioning method in distributed systems

Vertical partitioning is a process of generating the fragments, each of which is composed of attributes with high affinity. The concept of vertical partitioning has been applied to many research areas, especially databases and distributed systems, in order to improve the performance of query execution and system throughput. However, most previous approaches have focused their attention on generating an optimal partitioning without regard to the number of fragments finally generated, which is called best-fit vertical partitioning in this paper. On the other hand, there are some cases that a certain number of fragments are required to be generated by vertical partitioning, called n-way vertical partitioning in this paper. The n-way vertical partitioning problem has not fully investigated. In this paper, we propose an adaptable vertical partitioning method that can support both best-fit and n-way vertical partitioning. In addition, we present several experimental results to clarify the validness of the proposed algorithm. 2003 Published by Elsevier Inc.