Distributed Database Systems is an important

Fragment Allocation in Distributed Database

Systems

Reza Basseda

Faculty of Electrical and Computer Eng., School of Engineering, University of Tehran

Database Research Group

R.Basseda@ece.ut.ac.ir

Abstract

Choosing appropriate fragment allocation in

Distributed Database Systems is an important

issue in design of Distributed Database

Management System .Several fragment-

allocation algorithms have been suggested in the

area of DDBMS design. Each algorithm has its

own strengths and shortcomings. Therefore,

providing an appropriate algorithm is too

critical in DDBMS design and may lead to an

increase in Distributed Database Performance.

This article presents an overview of research

works on fragment allocation algorithms in

Database Research Group of University of

Tehran during last year. In order to clarify the

suggested algorithms and improvements in this

area, we conclude discussion with a summary on

our evaluations.

1. Introduction

Developments in database and networking

technologies in the past two decades led to

advances in distributed database systems. A

DDS is a collection of sites connected by a

communication network, in which each site is a

database system in its own right, but the sites

have agreed to work together, so that a user at

any site can access data anywhere in the network

exactly as if the data were all stored at the user’s

own site [11]. The primary concern of a DDS is

to design the fragmentation and allocation of the

underlying data. Fragmentation unit can be a file

where allocation issue becomes the file

allocation problem. File allocation problem is

studied extensively in the literature, started by

Chu [12] and continued for non-replicated and

replicated models [13, 14]. Some studies

considered dynamic file allocation [15, 16].

Various approaches have already been described

the data allocation technique in distributed

systems [1], [4], [5], [6]. Some methods are limited in their theoretical and implementation

parts [8], [9]. Other strategies are ignoring the

optimization of the transaction response time.

The other approaches present exponential time of

complexity and test their performance on

specific types of network connectivity [2].

Data allocation problem was introduced when

Eswaran [17] first proposed the data

fragmentation. Studies on vertical fragmentation

[18, 19]; horizontal fragmentation [20] and

mixed fragmentation [21] were conducted. The

allocation of the fragments is also studied

extensively.

In these studies, data allocation has been

proposed prior to the design of a database

depending on some static data access patterns

and/or static query patterns. In a static

environment, where the access probabilities of

nodes to the fragments never change, a static

allocation of fragments provides the best

solution. However, in a dynamic environment

where these probabilities change over time, the

static allocation solution would degrade the

database performance. Initial studies on dynamic

data allocation give a framework for data

redistribution and demonstrate how to perform

the redistribution process in a minimum possible

time. In [3] a dynamic data allocation algorithm

for non-replicated database systems is proposed

named optimal algorithm, but no modeling is

done to analyze the algorithm. In [5] the

threshold algorithm is proposed for dynamic data

allocation algorithm, which reallocates data with

respect to changing data access patterns. It

focused on load balancing issues.

A major cost in executing queries in a distributed

database system is the data transfer cost incurred

in transferring relations (fragments) accessed by

a query from different sites to the site where the

query is initiated. The objective of a data

allocation algorithm is to determine the

assignment of fragments at different sites so as to minimize the total data transfer cost incurred in

executing a set of queries. This is equivalent to

minimizing the average query execution time,

which is of primary importance in a wide class of

distributed conventional or multimedia database

systems.

2. Near Neighborhood Allocation

The NNA algorithm is basically a variation of

the optimal algorithm [3]. In optimal algorithm,

all fragments are initially distributed over the

nodes according to any static method but

afterwards, any node j, runs the optimal

algorithm described as follows for every

fragment I, that it stores.

(1) For each (locally) stored fragment, initialize

the access counter rows to zero. (Sij = 0

were i ε fragment indexes and j ε nodes)

(2) Process an access request for the stored

fragment

(3) Increase the corresponding access counter of