Self-managing online partitioner for databases (SMOPD): a vertical database partitioning system with a fully automatic online approach

A key factor of measuring database performance is query response time, which is dominated by I/O time. Database partitioning is among techniques that can help users reduce the I/O time significantly. However, how to efficiently partition tables in a database is not an easy problem, especially when we want to have this partitioning task done automatically by the system itself. This paper introduces an algorithm called Self-Managing Online Partitioner for Databases (SMOPD) in vertical partitioning based on closed item sets mining from a query set and system statistic information mined from system statistic views. This algorithm can dynamically monitor the database performance using user-configured parameters and automatically detect the performance trend so that it can decide when to perform a re-partitioning action without feedback from DBAs. This algorithm can free DBAs from the heavy tasks of keeping monitoring the system and struggling against the large statistic tables. The paper also presents the experimental results evaluating the performance of the algorithm using the TPC-H benchmark.