Incremental horizontal fragmentation:: A new approach in the design of distributed object oriented databases

Distributed relational or more. recently object-oriented databases usually employ data fragmentation techniques during the design phase in order to split and allocate the database entities across the nodes of the system. Most of the design algorithms are usually static and do not take into account the system evolution: data updates and addition of new applications. As this is an important issue in modern databases, we propose in this paper an incremental method for dynamically re-fragmenting an existing database as it evolves over time. We prove that by incrementally changing the database schema and allocation over time we improve database availability. This is a direct result of the reduced amount of time needed for incremental fragmentation as compared to a full fragmentation.