Physical Database Design: The Database Professional's Guide to Exploiting Indexes, Views, Storage, and More

By Tom Nadeau

Glossary

access path:: Another term for index structures, which provide a well-defined path through which data can be located and accessed by the database management system.
access plan:: See query execution plan.
attribute:: A primitive data element that provides descriptive detail about an entity; a data field or data item in a record. For example, lastname would be an attribute for the entity customer. Attributes may also be used as descriptive elements for certain relationships among entities.
automated design tool:: A software tool to help the database designer or database administrator design an optimal or near-optimal set of physical design parameters: indexing, materialized views, partitioning, and clustering.
autonomic computing:: A term formally coined by IBM in 2001. Its ultimate aim is to create self-managing computer systems overcoming the rapid growth in IT systems management complexity. Self-managing systems reduce administrator responsibility by introducing self-configuring (setup), self-optimizing (performance), self-healing (error avoidance), and self-protecting (security) capabilities. Automated physical database design is one of the major themes in autonomic computing.

base tables:: SQL tables that are defined from the original database design; materialized views are derived from the base tables.
BID:: Block identifier or block ID, the disk address of the physical block.
bitmap index:: A collection of bit vectors.
block:: The basic unit of data input/output from disk to RAM. It can range from a single record to millions of records. Usually large blocks are the most efficient way...

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Physical Database Design: The Database Professional's Guide to Exploiting Indexes, Views, Storage, and More