Paper Review: Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System
Title and Author of Paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System. P. G. Selinger et al. Summary This paper describes methods of the SQL query optimizer for determining the cost of satisfying a query. It also describes methods for choosing among several competing methods. What are the motivations for this work? SQL is a high-level language where requests for data are stated non-procedurally. The user is not expected to need any knowledge of how the data is stored in the database or how it is retrieved. Thus, it is up to the DBMS to choose an appropriate access path for data retrieval on the users behalf. By designing the database in this fashion, we preserve data independence, where a users view of the data is independent of the databases view of the data. ...