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Schema Tuning

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Definition

Schema tuning is the activity of organizing a set of table designs in order to improve overall query and update performance.

Historical Background

Table design entails deciding which tables to implement and which attributes to put in those tables. Other sections of this encyclopedia (design theory, normalization theory) discuss a mathematical model of table design to eliminate redundancy. Sometimes however redundancy can be good for performance, so database tuners must consider the possibility of a principled incorporation of redundancy.

Foundations

Normalization tends to break up the attributes of an application into separate tables. Consider the normalized schema consisting of two tables:

Blog(blog_id, author_id, title, numreaders) and

Author(author_id, author_city).

If one frequently wants to associate blogs with the city of their authors, then this table design requires a join on author_id for each of these queries. A denormalized alternative is to add author_location to

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Recommended Reading

  1. Celko J. and Joe Celko's. SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (3rd Edn.). Morgan Kaufmann, San Fransisco, CA, 2005.

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  2. Kimball R. and Ross M. The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (2nd Edn.). Wiley, New York, NY, 2002.

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  3. Shasha D. and Bonnet P. Database Tuning: Principles, Experiments and Troubleshooting Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann, San Fransisco, CA, 2002.

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  4. Tow D. SQL Tuning. OReilly, North Sebastopol, CA, 2003.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Philippe Bonnet

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Dennis Shasha

Authors
  1. Philippe Bonnet
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  2. Dennis Shasha
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Bonnet, P., Shasha, D. (2009). Schema Tuning. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_322

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