Stringent performance requirements in DB applications have led to the use of parallelism for database processing. To allow the database system to take advantage of the performance of parallel shared-nothing systems, the physical DB design must be appropriate for the DB structure and the workload. We develop decision algorithms that will select a good physical DB design both when the DB is first loaded into the system (static decision) and while the DB is being used by the workload (dynamic decision). Our decision algorithms take the database structure, workload, and system characteristics as inputs. The static (or initial) physical DB design decision algorithm involves: • selecting a partitioning attribute for each relation that determines how the relation is fragmented across the nodes (allowing for high I/O bandwidth); • selecting indexes on the relation attributes to allow faster accesses compared to sequential file scans; • selecting the attributes by which to cluster a relation in order to take advantage of the prefetching and caching involved in I/O access; • grouping of relations to allow DB operations (joins) on relation pairs to be executed locall
