Performance comparison of index partitioning schemes for distributed query processing

The benefit of using indexes for processing 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. Two approaches are presented for processing such an index partitioning scheme in response to a range query and their performance is compared with the typical scheme. The performance of these schemes is evaluated in terms of the response time, system throughput, network utilization and disk utilization while varying the number of nodes and query