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Figure 5.2 Top-Down Design Process
The requirements document is input to two parallel activities: view design and conceptual design. The view design activity deals with defining the interfaces for end users. The conceptual design, on the other hand, is the process by which the enterprise is examined to determine entity types and relationships among these entities. One can possibly divide this process into two related activity groups [Davenport, 1981]: entity analysis and functional analysis. Entity analysis is concerned with determining the entities, their attributes, and the relationships among them. Functional analysis, on the other hand, is concerned with determining the fundamental functions with which the modeled enterprise is involved. The results of these two steps need to be cross-referenced to get a better understanding of which functions deal with which entities.
There is a relationship between the conceptual design and the view design. In one sense, the conceptual design can be interpreted as being an integration of user views. Even though this view integration activity is very important, the conceptual model should support not only the existing applications, but also future applications, view integration should be used to ensure that entity and relationship requirements for all the views are covered in the conceptual schema.
In conceptual design and view design activities the user needs to specify the data entities and must determine the applications that will run on the database as well as statistical information about these applications. Statistical information includes the specification of the frequency of user applications, the volume of various information, and the like. Note that from the conceptual design step comes the definition of global conceptual schema discussed in Section 4.3. We have not yet considered the implications of the distributed environment; in fact, up to this point, the process is identical to that in a centralized database design.
The global conceptual schema (GCS) and access pattern information collected as a result of view design are inputs to the distribution design step. The objective at this stage, which is the focus of this chapter, is to design the local conceptual schemas (LCSs) by distributing the entities over the sites of the distributed system. It is possible, of course, to treat each entity as a unit of distribution. Given that we use the relational model as the basis of discussion in this book, the entities correspond to relations.
Rather than distributing relations, it is quite common to divide them into subrelations, called fragments, which are then distributed. Thus the distribution design activity consists of two steps: fragmentation and allocation. The reason for separating the distribution design into two steps is to better deal with the complexity of the problem. However, as we discuss at the end of the chapter, this raises other concerns. These are the major issues that are treated in this chapter, so we delay discussing them until later sections.
The last step in the design process is the physical design, which maps the local conceptual schemas to the physical storage devices available at the corresponding sites. The inputs to this process are the local conceptual schema and access pattern information about the fragments in these.
It is well known that design and development activity of any kind is an ongoing process requiring constant monitoring and periodic adjustment and tuning. We have therefore included observation and monitoring as a major activity in this process. Note that one does not monitor only the behavior of the database implementation but also the suitability of user views. The result is some form of feedback, which may result in backing up to one of the earlier steps in the design.
5.1.2 Bottom-Up Design Process
Top-down design is a suitable approach when a database system is being designed from scratch. Commonly, however, a number of databases already exist, and the design task involves integrating them into one database. The bottom-up approach is suitable for this type of environment. The starting point of bottom-up design is the individual local conceptual schemas. The process consists of integrating local schemas into the global conceptual schema.
This type of environment exists primarily in the context of heterogeneous databases. Significant research has been conducted within this context as well. We will, therefore, defer the discussion of the bottom-up design process until Chapter 15. The rest of this chapter concentrates on the two fundamental issues in top-down design: fragmentation and allocation.