Essay: Techniques for improving database performance

Sample Essay

There are basically four methods used to improve database performance namely; partitioning, elimination of fragmentation, table clustering and size maximization.

2.1 Partitioning

Partitioning refers to a physical design of database technique that most data modelers and DBAs are versed with (Eyas, 2003). Although it can be used to accomplish a number of various objectives, its chief role is to minimize the quantity of data read for given SQL operations for the total response time to be reduced. Partitioning is of two types, vertical and horizontal.

2.1.1Vertical Partitioning

This is normally used to reduce the width of a target table via splitting a table vertically. This includes certain columns in a given dataset, each partition having rows. Wide- text tables or BLOB columns previously not addressed is an example of vertical partitioning (Zhou, 1998).

 2.1.2 Horizontal partitioning

Horizontal partitioning segments table rows thus leading to the making of distinct groups of row based datasets which can be worked out singly. No table attributes miss since all columns defined to a table are found in each set partition (Gros and Amsleg, 2005).  An example of horizontal partitioning might be a table that contains ten years worth of historical invoice data being partitioned into ten distinct partitions (Bhakthavatsalam, 2008), where each partition contains a single year’s worth of data.

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