Preprocessing predicates and queries

摘要

Fragmentation has been used to distribute the contents of a database across the sites of a distributed database system. During run time, the system must determine which fragments can be used to answer each query. This process requires solving the predicate implication problem. In order to speed processing, it is desirable to do as much preprocessing as possible on the prestored fragments, without knowledge of the run-time query. In this paper, performing preprocessing on database fragments to speed later run-time implication checking is investigated. The investigation is based on a new concept, separation among predicates. When two predicates are properly separated, their union cannot be implied by any other conjunctive predicate unless one of them is implied by the conjunctive predicate. A polynomial time algorithm for checking the pair-wise separation among a collection of fragment predicates is introduced and its complexity is theoretically analyzed. The separation checking algorithm is accompanied by a query processing algorithm which makes use of the result of the separation properties of the fragments to speed real time query processing. The two algorithms presented are scalable according to available preprocessing time in the sense that the preprocessing algorithm can be run for shorter periods to produce partial preprocessing that can still be used by the query processing algorithm.