A multidatabase system (MDBS) integrates information from multiple autonomous local databases. Performing global query optimization
to achieve efficient query processing in such a system is challenging due to local autonomy of the data sources. Dynamic factors
in the environment make the problem even more difficult. In this paper, we present two techniques, i.e., contention space
partitioning and cost error controlling, to perform global query optimization in a dynamic MDBS. Both techniques generate
an execution plan with multiple versions for a query in a dynamic MDBS, utilizing the multistate cost models built for the
dynamic environment via our previous multistate query sampling method. The first technique partitions the contention space
of a dynamic multidatabase environment into a given number of subspaces and chooses a good query execution plan version for
each subspace, while the second technique selects a set of execution plan versions by using a given error tolerance to control
query execution costs. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed techniques are quite promising for performing global query
optimization in a dynamic MDBS. Compared with related work on dynamic query optimization, our approach has an advantage of
avoiding the high overhead for modifying or re-generating an execution plan for a query based on dynamic runtime information.
Keywords Multidatabase system - Dynamic environment - Query optimization - Multistate cost model - Execution plan - Algorithm
Communicated by Ahmed K. Elmagarmid.
Research was supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grant # IIS-9811980 and The University of Michigan.