The generalized physical design problem in data warehousing environment: Towards a generic cost model

Over the years, plenty of cost models for physical database design were developed. However, solving the physical design problem in a generic way is still a hard task. In this paper, we (1) summarize the development stages of cost models for database systems, (2) propose a generic cost model for the generalized physical design problem, and (3) apply our model on the joint query scheduling and buffer management problem.