A New Method of Dynamic Horizontal Fragmentation for Multimedia Databases Contemplating Content-Based Queries

Abstract

The proper storage and management of multimedia data is a topic of great interest to industry and academia. Database fragmentation plays a fundamental role as a mechanism to guarantee cost reduction and improve response time performance in distributed data management environments. Multimedia database access patterns are constantly changing; due to this, it is important that the partitioning schemes also adapt to these changes. Dynamic fragmentation techniques offer this advantage and represent a reduction of the tasks that an administrator must perform and the complete autonomy to determine when to carry out a new fragmentation based on a cost model. This work proposes a new method of dynamic horizontal fragmentation for multimedia databases, including a way to contemplate content-based queries in the creation of new fragments. The use of content-based queries is on the rise, as multimedia elements are often presented within databases, and for this reason new fragmentation strategies must include this aspect to provide better-performing schemas. The method included in this research is placed within a current web application called XAMANA. We performed some experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.