An Interactive DSS Tool for Physical Database

The design of efficient physical databases is a complex activity involving the consideration of a large number of factors. Because of the complexity, mathematical programming approaches seeking to optimize the physical database have to make many simplifying assumptions; therefore, their applicability is limited. Further, the database designer may want to experiment with design preferences and features not considered by the mathematical optimization approaches. In order to effectively design the physical database, this article describes an interactive DSS tool, which aides the database designer in this task. The database design is accomplished in the context of a high-level abstract model which is capable of being implemented in a variety of DBMSs and file systems. Because of this generic nature of the abstract model, the utility of the DSS tool is enhanced. The interactive tool not only lets the designer experiment with his own designs, but also provides several heuristic optimization procedures to enable the generation of many good designs. The heuristic designs may be used for final physical database design as well as for further experimentation. The paper also includes examples of how the physical design selected using the abstract model and the interactive tool may be implemented on several DBMSs and file systems.