INCREMENTAL HORIZONTAL FRAGMENTATION OF DATABASE CLASS OBJECTS

Abstract: Horizontal fragments of a class in an object-oriented database system contain subsets of the class extent or instance objects. These fragments are created with a set of system input data consisting of the application queries, their access frequencies, the object database schema with components- class inheritance and class composition hierarchies as well as instance objects of classes. When these system input to the fragmentation process change enough to affect system performance, a refragmentation is usually done from scratch. This paper proposes an incremental re-fragmentation method that uses mostly the updated part of input data and previous fragments to define new fragments more quickly, saving system resources and making the data at distributed sites more available for network and web access.