Command use in a relational database system

Abstract

A study of commands in a relational database system was undertaken to provide a basis for improving future implementations of relational techniques. The use of Regis (Relational General Information System), an interactive relational database system developed at General Motors Research Laboratories, was monitored to accumulate a large amount of data about distribution of command uses across a variety of applications developed by users with a diverse set of capabilities. Of the basic relational commands, it is important that searching, PROJECTION, and JOIN operations be efficient. However, optimizing INTERSECTION and "exclusive or" may not warrant the time and effort it would require. Although proportions of use varied, the rankings of use of relational operations were reasonably independent of applications and the programming expertise level of the users.

Selecting a Database Partitioning Technique

“…Since most real database applications require more retrievals than updates (Joyce & Warn, 1983;Magalnaes, 1981) and more updates than schema modifications, it is reasonable for us to assume the following order: f ret >f upd >f schmod . In the following paragraphs, we examine the impact of these frequencies on the weighted values of the partitioning techniques.…”