The Complexity of Operations on a Fragmented Relation

Data fragmentation is an important aspect of distributed database design, in which portions of relations, tailored to the specific needs of local applications, are defined to be further allocated to the sites of the computer network supporting the database system. In this paper we present a theory of fragmentation with overlapping fragments to study the complexity of the problems involved in checking the completeness of a fragmentation schema and in querying and updating a fragmented relation. We analyze these problems from the complexity viewpoint and present sound and complete algorithms for their solution.