Physical Database Design

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Preface

ince the development of the relational model by E. F. Codd at IBM in 1970, rela-

tional 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. ...