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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1–7Cite as

Cost Estimation

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Definition

Execution costs, or simply costs, is a generic term to collectively refer to the various goals or objectives of database query optimization. Optimization aims at finding the “cheapest” (“best” or at least a “reasonably good”) query execution plan (QEP) among semantically equivalent alternative plans for the given query. Cost is used as a metric to compare plans. Depending on the application, different types of costs are considered. Traditional optimization goals include minimizing response time (for the first answer or the complete result), minimizing resource consumption (like CPU time, I/O, network bandwidth, or amount of memory required), or maximizing throughput, i.e., the number of queries that the system can answer per time. Other, less obvious objectives – e.g., in a mobile environment – may be to minimize the power consumption needed to answer the query or the on-line time being connected to a remote database server.

Obviously, evaluating a QEP to measure its...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Stefan Manegold

Authors
  1. Stefan Manegold
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Correspondence to Stefan Manegold .

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Editors and Affiliations

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

    Ling Liu

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

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Ioannina, P.O. Box 1186, 45110, Ioannina, Greece

    Evaggelia Pitoura

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Manegold, S. (2016). Cost Estimation. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_857-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_857-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

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