Introduction to Physical Database Design - Physical Database Design - page 12

• Tip 2. Be prepared to tinker. The possibilities are endless, and you will never be able to

explore them all. But with some wisdom and insight you and some playing around
with possibilities you can go far. Trial and error is part of the process.

•

Tip 3. Use the tools at your disposal. Throughout this topic we will describe various
techniques and methods for physcal database design. Many database design perform an
order of magnitude worse than they could simply because the designer didn't bother to
use the techniques available. Database designs does not begin and end with simple sin-
gle column index selection. By exploiting features like memory tuning, materialized
views, range partitioning, multidimensional clustering, clustering indexes, or shared
nothing partitioning you can dramatically improve on a basic database design, espe-
cially for complex query processing.

1.5 Literature Summary

Database system and design textbooks and practitioners' guides that give serious
attention to the principles of physical database design include Burleson [2005],
Elmasri and Navathe [2003], Garcie-Molina, Ullman, and Widom [2000, 2001],
Ramakrishnan and Gehrke [2004], Shasha and Bonnet [2003], and Silberschatz,
Korth, and Sudarshan [2006].
Knowledge of logical data modeling and physical database design techniques is
important for database practitioners and application developers. The database life cycle
shows what steps are needed in a methodical approach to database design from logical
design, which is independent of the system environment, to physical design, which is
based on maximizing the performance of the database under various workloads.

Agarwal, S., Chaudhuri, S., Kollar, L., Maranthe, A., Narasayya, V., and Syamala, M.
Database Tuning Advisor for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. 30th Very Large Database
Conference (VLDB) , Toronto, Canada, 2004.

Burleson, D. Physical Database Design Using Oracle. Boca Raton, FL: Auerbach Publish-
ers, 2005.

Elmasri, R., and Navathe, S. B. Fundamentals of Database Systems . Boston: Addison-
Wesley, 4th ed. Redwood City, CA, 2004.

Garcia-Molina, H., Ullman, J., and Widom, J. Database System Implementation . Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000.

Garcia-Molina, H., Ullman, J., and Widom, J. Database Systems: The Complete Book .
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001.