
Chapter 12
New Challenges in Physical
Database Design
In this chapter we discuss some future directions and challenges in the area of
physical database design. Some of the problems we introduce in the following
sections have been partially addressed in the recent literature, while others
remain fairly open-ended. Figure 12.1 depicts a high-level architecture of a
traditional physical design tool and introduces the four challenges that we
cover in subsequent sections. Specifically, we discuss the ability to (1) handle
richer workloads, (2) make additional recommendations related to physical de-
sign, (3) interact with physical design tools in different