Physical Database Design

9.3 Impact-first Waterfall Strategy 171

4. Materialized views.

5. Indexes.

This ranking suggests that shared-nothing partitioning and MDC should be

designed first, and index design last with the goal of minimizing the inconvenience of

database redesign. In practice, few database designers design new databases in this

sequence. However, understanding the relative pain of changing design choices does

seriously impact the design planning process. Understanding the relative inconvenience

usually means that database designers are loathe to design shared-nothing partitioning

and MDC casually because the overhead of redesign is quite high. Decisions for shared-

nothing partitioning and MDC are usually made carefully, slowly, and applied with the

assumption that ...