A Physical Database Design Method for Multidimensional File Organizations

This paper presents a physical database design methodology for multidimen-sional le organizations. Physical database design is the process of determining the optimal connguration of physical les and access structures for a given set of queries. Recently, many multidimensional le organizations have been proposed in the literature. However, there has been no eeort for their physical database design. We rst show that the performance of query processing is highly aaected by the similarity between the shapes of query regions and page regions in the domain space, and then propose a method for nding the optimal connguration of the multidimensional le by controlling the interval ratio of diierent axes to achieve the similarity. For performance evaluation, we perform extensive experiments with the multilevel grid le, a multidimensional le organization, using various types of queries and record distributions. The results indicate that our proposed method builds optimal multilevel grid les regardless of the query types and record distributions. When the interval ratio of a two-dimensional query region is 1:1024, the performance of the proposed method is enhanced by as much as 7.5 times over that of the conventional method that has the interval ratio of 1:1 employing the cyclic splitting strategy. The performance is further enhanced for the query types having higher interval ratios. The result is signiicant since interval ratios can be far from 1:1 for many practical applications, especially when diierent axes have diierent domains.