A Multiuser Performance Analysis of Alternative Declustering Strategies

In multiprocessor shared-nothing database machines, the storage organization for a relation is independent of the strategy used to partition the relation. A database administrator for such a system has a wide range of alternatives when creating a relation. In this paper, we analyze the impact of three alternative partitioning strategies on the selection queries using different storage/access structures in a multiuser environment. We quantify the tradeoffs of each organization in the context of the Gamma database machine. The response time and throughput of the system are used as the performance metric for evaluating the alternative partitioning strategies