Patent ID: 7472107

Claim:
For use with a database system having a workload comprising a set of queries that have been executed on the database, a method for selecting a set of partitioned physical database structures for access by the database system in executing queries comprising the steps of: compiling a pool of horizontally partitioned candidate structures by: for each query, determining potentially relevant structures and associating at least one horizontal partitioning method with each structure; selecting potentially relevant structures with associated horizontal partitioning methods to add to the pool of partitioned candidate structures; augmenting the pool of partitioned candidate structures by determining generalized partitioned structures that are relevant over a set of queries in the workload and adding them to the pool of partitioned candidate structures, wherein determining generalized partitioned structures is performed by merging partitioned structures in the pool of partitioned candidate structures and merging the horizontal partitioning methods associated with the partitioned structures in the pool; enumerating a set of horizontally partitioned physical structures from the pool of partitioned candidate structures.