The Effect of Horizontal Database Table Partitioning on Query Performance

Salam Matalqa and Suleiman Mustafa

Department of Computer Information Systems, Yarmouk University, Jordan

Abstract: The need for achieving optimal performance for database applications is a primary objective for database designers and a primary requirement for database end users. Partitioning is one of the techniques used by designers to improve the performance of database access. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of horizontal table partitioning on query Response Time (RT) using three partitioning strategies: Zero partitioning, list partitioning and range partitioning. Three tables extracted from the Student Information System (SIS) at Yarmouk University in Jordan were used in this research. Variation in table size was used to determine when partitioning can have an impact (if any) on access performance. A set of 12 queries were run over a database of three different sizes. The results indicated that partitioning provided better RT than zero partitioning, on the other hand, range and list partitioning strategies showed little performance differences with the different database sizes.

Keywords: Table partitioning, horizontal partitioning, range partitioning, list partitioning, database performance.

 Received July 22, 2015; accepted October 18, 2015