In a distributed DBMS, relations are stored across several sites. Accessing a relation that is stored at a remote site incurs message-passing costs, and to reduce this overhead, a single relation may be partitioned or fragmented across several sites, with fragments stored at the sites where they are most often accessed, or replicated at each site where the relation is in high demand.
Fragmentation
Fragmentation consists of breaking a relation into smaller relations or fragments, and storing the fragments (instead of the relation itself), possibly at dierent sites. In horizontal fragmentation, each fragment consists of a subset of rows of the original relation. In vertical fragmentation, each fragment consists of a subset of columns of the original relation. Horizontal and vertical fragments are illustrated in Figure 21.4.