Vertical Partitioning in Database Design

Abstract When a transaction in a relational database system is processed, transaction response time is likely dominated by the disk access time. By partitioning a relation into fragments, according to the requirement of transactions, a transaction can avoid accessing the useless data. In this paper, an algorithm using the A ∗ technique, which can find the global optimal partition quickly, is presented. Two refinement methods—reduction of the search space and good estimation — are also proposed to improve the performance of the search procedure.