Effectively and Efficiently Designing and Querying Parallel Relational Data Warehouses on Heterogeneous Database Clusters: The F&A Approach

In this paper, a comprehensive methodology for designing and querying Parallel Rational Data Warehouses (PRDW) over database clusters, called Fragmentation & Allocation (F&A) is proposed. F&A assumes that cluster nodes are heterogeneous in processing power and storage capacity, contrary to traditional design approaches that assume that cluster nodes are instead homogeneous, and fragmentation and allocation phases are performed in a simultaneous manner. In classical approaches, two different cost models are used to perform fragmentation and allocation, separately, whereas F&A makes use of one cost model that considers fragmentation and allocation parameters simultaneously. Therefore, according to the F&A methodology proposed, the allocation phase/decision is done at fragmentation. At the fragmentation phase, F&A uses two well-known algorithms, namely Hill Climbing (HC) and Genetic Algorithm (GA), which the authors adapt to the main PRDW design problem over heterogeneous database clusters, as these algorithms are capable of taking into account the heterogeneous characteristics of the reference application scenario. At the allocation phase, F&A introduces an innovative matrix-based formalism capable of capturing the interactions among fragments, input queries, and cluster node characteristics, driving the data allocation task accordingly, and a related affinity-based algorithm, called F&A-ALLOC. Finally, their proposal is experimentally assessed and validated against the widely-known data warehouse benchmark APB-1 release II.