Materialized views and indexes are physical structures for accelerating data access that are casually used in data warehouses. However, these data structures generate some maintenance overhead. They also share the same storage space. Most existing studies about materialized view and index selection consider these structures separately. In this paper, we adopt the opposite stance and couple materialized view and index selection to take view-index interactions into account and achieve efficient storage space sharing. Candidate materialized views and indexes are selected through a data mining process. We also exploit cost models that evaluate the respective benefit of indexing and view materialization, and help select a relevant configuration of indexes and materialized views among the candidates. Experimental results show that our strategy performs better than an independent selection of materialized views and indexes.
In this paper we describe novel techniques that make it possible to build an industrial-strength tool for automating the choice of indexes in the physical design of a SQL database. The tool takes as input a workload of SQL queries, and suggests a set of suitable indexes. We ensure that the indexes chosen are effective in reducing the cost of the workload by keeping the index selection tool and the query optimizer "in step". The number of index sets that must be evaluated to find the optimal configuration is very large. We reduce the complexity of this problem using three techniques. First, we remove a large number of spurious indexes from consideration by taking into account both query syntax and cost information. Second, we introduce optimizations that make it possible to cheaply evaluate the “goodness” of an index set. Third, we describe an iterative approach to handle the complexity arising from multicolumn indexes. The tool has been implemented on Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. We performed extensive experiments over a range of workloads, including TPC-D. The results indicate that the tool is efficient and its choices are close to optimal. An important problem in the physical design of databases is the selection of secondary indices. In general, this problem cannot be solved in an optimal way due to the complexity of the selection process. Often use is made of heuristics such as the well-known ADD and DROP algorithms. In this paper it will be shown that frequently used cost functions can be classified as super- or submodular functions. For these functions several mathematical properties have been derived which reduce the complexity of the index selection problem. These properties will be used to develop a tool for physical database design and also give a mathematical foundation for the success of the before-mentioned ADD and DROP algorithms.  We present a novel approach for a tool that assists the database administrator in designing an index configuration for a relational database system. A new methodology for collecting usage statistics at run time is developed which lets the optimizer estimate query execution costs for alternative index configurations. Defining the workload specification required by existing index design tools may be very complex for a large integrated database system. Our tool automatically derives the workload statistics. These statistics are then used to efficiently compute an index configuration. Execution of a prototype of the tool against a sample database demonstrates that the proposed index configuration is reasonably close to the optimum for test query sets. Intending to develop a tool which aims to support the physical design of relational databases can not be done without considering the problem of index selection. Generally the problem is split into a primary and secondary index selection problem and the selection is done per table. Whereas much attention has been paid on the selection of secondary indices relatively less is known about the selection of a primary index and the relation between them. These are exactly the topics of this paper. >