Models for the combined logical and physical design of databases

Given the set of intended transactions, the authors model the problem of choosing the most efficient decomposition of the universal set of attributes. Unlike other models which neglect the logical structure developed in database theory, the model developed incorporates it as part of a mathematical program. This provides a comprehensive and an integrated formulation for the combined logical and physical database design problem. The integrated problem and its ε-approximation schemes are shown to be NP-complete. An example shows the benefit of such an approach over more conventional ones