SimulPh.D.: A physical design simulator tool

Abstract

The importance of physical design has been amplified as query optimizers became sophisticated to cope with complex decision support applications. During the physical design phase, the database designer (DBD) has to select optimization techniques to improve query performance and to well manage different resources assigned for his/her databases. The decision of using these optimization techniques is taken either before or after creating the database schema. Once this decision taken, DBD has to perform three main tasks: (i) choosing one or several optimization techniques, (ii) managing interdependencies among the chosen techniques and (iii) choosing a selection algorithm for each technique. Faced to these crucial choices, the development of simulators intended to improve the quality of the physical design represents challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a simulator, called SimulPh.D that assists DBD to perform different choices thanks to user friendly graphical interfaces. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.