XML data sources are gaining popularity in the context of Business Intelligence and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications, due to the amenities of XML in representing and managing complex and heterogeneous data. However, XML-native database systems currently suffer from limited performance, both in terms of volumes of manageable data and query response time. Therefore, recent research efforts are focusing on horizontal fragmentation techniques, which are able to overcome the above limitations. However, classical fragmentation algorithms are not suitable to control the number of originated fragments, which instead plays a critical role in data warehouses. In this paper, we propose the use of the K-means clustering algorithm for effectively and efficiently supporting the fragmentation of very large XML data warehouses. We complement our analytical contribution with a comprehensive experimental assessment where we compare the efficiency of our proposal against existing fragmentation algorithms.
 The problem of selecting an optimal fragmentation schema of a data warehouse is more challenging compared to that in relational and object databases. This challenge is due to the several choices of partitioning star or snowflake schemas. Data partitioning is beneficial if and only if the fact table is fragmented based on the partitioning schemas of dimension tables. This may increase the number of fragments of the fact tables dramatically and makes their maintenance very costly. Therefore, the right selection of fragmenting schemas is important for better performance of OLAP queries. In this paper, we present a genetic algorithm for schema partitioning selection problem. The proposed algorithm gives better solutions since the search space is constrained by the schema partitioning. We conduct several experimental studies using the APB-1 release II benchmark for validating the proposed algorithm. Vertical partitioning is the process of subdividing the attributes of a relation or a record type, creating fragments. Previous approaches have used an iterative binary partitioning method which is based on clustering algorithms and mathematical cost functions. In this paper, however, we propose a new vertical partitioning algorithm using a graphical technique. This algorithm starts from the attribute affinity matrix by considering it as a complete graph. Then, forming a linearly connected spanning tree, it generates all meaningful fragments simultaneously by considering a cycle as a fragment. We show its computational superiority. It provides a cleaner alternative without arbitrary objective functions and provides an improvement over our previous work on vertical partitioning.