| Since the development of the relational model by E. F. Codd at IBM in 1970, relational databases have become the de facto standard for managing and querying structured data. The rise of the Internet, online transaction processing, online banking, and the ability to connect heterogeneous systems have all contributed to the massive growth in data volumes over the past 15 years. Terabyte-sized databases have become commonplace. Concurrent with this data growth have come dramatic increases in CPU performance spurred by Moore’s Law, and improvements in disk technology that have brought about a dramatic increase in data density for disk storage. Modern databases frequently need to support thousands if not tens of thousands of concurrent users. The performance and maintainability of database systems depends dramatically on their physical design.
A wealth of technologies has been developed by leading database vendors allowing for a fabulous range of physical design features and capabilities. Modern databases can now be sliced, diced, shuffled, and spun in a magnificent set of ways, both in memory and on disk. Until now, however, not much has been written on the topic of physical database design. While it is true that there have been white papers and articles about individual features and even individual products, relatively little has been written on the subject as a whole. Even less has been written to commiserate with database designers over the practical difficulties that the complexity of “creeping featurism” has imposed on the industry. This is all the more reason why a text on physical database design is urgently needed. |
