An integrated design scheme for performance optimization in distributed environments

Among the techniques that the distributed database designer considers for performance improvement are fragmentation, replication and allocation techniques. Fragmentation is the process of dividing a relation into two or more relations called fragments. Usually two fragmentation techniques are considered, these are: vertical and horizontal fragmentation. A third rarely considered one is hybrid or mixed fragmentation. In this paper, vertical fragmentation along with a two-phases allocation method in the context of relational DDBSs is proposed to partition a relation vertically and allocate the resulting fragments/attributes across different sites. The proposed algorithm will greatly minimize communication cost and query response time in DDBSs. Empirical results have supported this hypothesis and shown that this method will present an efficient solution to vertical fragmentation and allocation problem in distributed environments.