Dynamic Vertical Partitioning of Multimedia Databases Using Active Rules

Abstract

Vertical partitioning is a design technique widely employed in relational databases to reduce the number of irrelevant attributes accessed by the queries. Currently, due to the popularity of multimedia applications on the Internet, the need of using partitioning techniques in multimedia databases has arisen in order to use their potential advantages with regard to query optimization. In multimedia databases, the attributes tend to be of very large multimedia objects. Therefore, the reduction in the number of accesses to irrelevant objects would imply a considerable cost saving in the query execution. Nevertheless, the use of vertical partitioning techniques in multimedia databases implies two problems: 1) most vertical partitioning algorithms only take into account alphanumeric data, and 2) the partitioning process is carried out in a static way. In order to address these problems, we propose an active system called DYMOND, which performs a dynamic vertical partitioning in multimedia databases to improve query performance. Experimental results on benchmark multimedia databases clarify the validness of our system.