Solving the Partitioning Problem in Database Design

Response time of a database system is largely determined by the number of secondary disk accesses required to process database transactions. To minimize disk accesses, a database file should be structured in such a way as to closely match data requirements of these transactions. The way in which data are organized for efficient processing of database transactions is called database partitioning. As data are stored in the form of tables in a relational database, data partitioning can be performed either vertically (i.e, along the attributes or columns) or horizontally (i.e., along the tuples or rows).