Overview
After ER design, schema refinement, and the definition of views, we have the conceptual and external schemas for our database.
The next step is to choose indexes, make clustering decisions, and to refine the conceptual and external schemas (if necessary) to meet performance goals.
We must begin by understanding the workload:
- The most important queries and how often they arise.
- The most important updates and how often they arise.
- The desired performance for these queries and updates.