DECOMPOSITION STORAGE MODEL.

Abstract

This report examines the relative advantages of a storage model based on decomposition (of community view relations into binary relations containing a surrogate and one attribute) over conventional n-ary storage models. There seems to be a general consensus among the database community that the n-ary approach is better. This conclusion is usually based on a consideration of only one or two dimensions of a database system. The purpose of this report is not to claim that decomposition is better. Instead, we claim that the consensus opinion is not well founded and that neither is clearly better until a closer analysis is made along the many dimensions of a database system. The purpose of this report is to move further in both scope and depth toward such an analysis. We examine such dimensions as simplicity, generality, storage requirements, update performance and retrieval performance.