Chapter Five

Physical Database Design

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 Objectives

 Understand Purpose of physical database design

 Describe the physical database design process
 Choose storage formats for attributes
 Describe indexes and their appropriate use

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 Logical vs Physical Database Design

 Logical database design is independent of

implementation details, such as functionality of target
DBMS.
 Logical database design concerned with the what,
physical database design is concerned with the how.
 Physical Design is description of the implementation of
the database on secondary storage using the target
DBMS

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 Physical Database Design

 Process of producing a description of

implementation of the database on secondary
storage.
 The main tasks including: field specification,
choosing indexes and file organization, and to
refine the conceptual and external schemas (if
necessary) to meet performance goals.

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 Cont…
 The primary goal of physical database design is data
processing efficiency (Time and Storage impact)
 We will concentrate on choices often available to
optimize performance of database services
 Many physical database design decisions are implicit
in the technology adopted

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 Cont…
 Design decision about Storage Format
 Choosing the storage format of each field (attribute).
 The DBMS provides some set of data types that can be
used for the physical storage of fields in the database
 Data Type (format) is chosen to optimize storage space
and maximize data integrity

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 Cont…
 It is also called Designing Fields
 Field
 Smallest unit of named application data recognized by system
software
 Attributes from relations will be represented as fields
 In addition to Choosing data type you may also
consider Coding (optional)
 Controlling data integrity
 Data Type
 A coding scheme recognized by system software for
representing organizational data

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 Cont…
 Choosing Data Types
 CHAR–fixed-length character
 VARCHAR–variable-length character (memo)
 LONG–large number
 NUMBER–positive/negative number
 INEGER–positive/negative whole number
 DATE–actual date
 BLOB–binary large object (good for graphics, sound
clips, etc.)

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 Cont…
 Objectives of choosing data types
 Minimize storage space
 Represent all possible values of the field
 Improve data integrity of the field
 Support all data manipulations desired on the
field

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 Example storage format (field design) for
the “Branch” table

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 Cont…
 Choose indexes
 Index in a database is similar to an index in a book
 Primary indexes is automatic by the primary key
 Clustering index- by non key attribute
 Guidelines for Choosing Indexes
 Specify a unique index for the primary key of each table.
 Specify an index for foreign keys.
 Specify an index for nonkey fields that are referenced in
qualification, sorting and grouping commands for the purpose
of retrieving data.

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 Rules for Using Indexes
1. Use on larger tables
2. Index the primary key of each table
3. Index search fields (fields frequently in WHERE clause)
4. Fields in SQL ORDER BY and GROUP BY commands
5. When there are >100 values but not when there are <30
values

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 Rules for Using Indexes (cont.)
6. Avoid use of indexes for fields with long values; perhaps
compress values first
7. DBMS may have limit on number of indexes per table and
number of bytes per indexed field(s)
8. Null values will not be referenced from an index
9. Use indexes heavily for non-volatile databases; limit the
use of indexes for volatile databases
Why? Because modifications (e.g. inserts, deletes) require updates to
occur in index files

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 End Of Chapter Five

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