ABSTRACT
In this chapter we discuss some future directions and challenges in the area of physical database design. Some of the problems we introduce in the following sections have been partially addressed in the recent literature, while others remain fairly open-ended. Figure 12.1 depicts a high-level architecture of a traditional physical design tool and introduces the four challenges that we cover in subsequent sections. Specifically, we discuss the ability to (1) handle richer workloads, (2) make additional recommendations related to physical design, (3) interact with physical design tools in different ways, and (4) evaluate competing physical design algorithms in a principled manner.
