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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 3308–3310Cite as

Schema Tuning

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Definition

Schema tuning is the activity of organizing a set of table designs in order to improve overall query and update performance.

Historical Background

Table design entails deciding which tables to implement and which attributes to put in those tables. Other sections of this encyclopedia (design theory, normalization theory) discuss a mathematical model of table design to eliminate redundancy. Sometimes however redundancy can be good for performance, so database tuners must consider the possibility of a principled incorporation of redundancy.

Foundations

Normalization tends to break up the attributes of an application into separate tables. Consider the normalized schema consisting of two tables:

  • Blog(blog_id, author_id, title, numreaders) and

  • Author(author_id, author_city).

If one frequently wants to associate blogs with the city of their authors, then this table design requires a join on author_id for each of these queries. A denormalized alternative is to add author_location to

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Recommended Reading

  1. Celko J. Joe Celko’s SQL for smarties: advanced SQL programming. 3rd ed. San Fransisco: Morgan Kaufmann; 2005.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Kimball R, Ross M. The data warehouse toolkit: the complete guide to dimensional modeling. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley; 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Shasha D, Bonnet P. Database tuning: principles, experiments and troubleshooting techniques. San Fransisco: Morgan Kaufmann; 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Tow D. SQL tuning. North Sebastopol: OReilly; 2003.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Philippe Bonnet

  2. Department of Computer Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Dennis Shasha

Authors
  1. Philippe Bonnet
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  2. Dennis Shasha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philippe Bonnet .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dep. of Computer Science, New York Univ., New York, NY, USA

    Dennis Shasha

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Cite this entry

Bonnet, P., Shasha, D. (2018). Schema Tuning. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_322

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