Decision rules for the automated generation of storage strategies in data management systems
Grant N. Smith · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1975
Current methods of determining storage strategies (both logical and physical) rely usually on (1) expert opinion, and (2) the experience of the designers. There has been some work in the area of automated design, but the approaches taken to date generally apply only at generation time, thus leaving the resulting design in effect for the rest of the life of the system. Should usage of the system change over time, as experience shows that it will, large inefficiencies may result owing to the original choice of storage strategy. The work presented here attempts to introduce dynamic decisions regarding storage strategies that will be invoked (1) on a regular basis, and (2) when system performance degrades below an unacceptable level. These decisions involve both the structure of the data base (such as which fields are to be in which files), as well as indexing, data encoding, factoring and virtualizing decisions. Decision rules are described which achieve this result. Also described is a procedure whereby any given request will be most efficiently satisfied, making use of the current structure of the data base, indexes, etc. Finally, the set of decision variables required to drive the above decision subsystems is specified in detail.