A survey of DBMS physical design approaches

In this paper we survey various DBMS physical design options. We will consider both vertical and horizontal partitioning, and briefly cover replication. This survey is not limited only to local systems, but also includes distributed ones. The latter adds a new interesting question — how to actually distribute data among several processing nodes. Aside from theoretical approaches we consider the practical ones, implemented in any contemporary DBMS. We cover these aspects not only from user, but also architect and programmer perspectives.