Question

What is Data Fragmentation. Consider the following Student relation. How would you fragment Student relation horizontally based on Student’s Branch? Give a short discussion of your decision.

StudentID	Name	DoB	Branch	Course ID	Teacher Name
1	Amal	11/02/1998	Abha	IT344	Dr Rana
1	Amal	11/02/1998	Abha	IT340	Dr Khalid
2	Ahmed	15/11/2000	Jeddah	IT210	Dr Ali
3	Aysha	09/09/2000	Riyadh	IT344	Dr Rana
4	Bader	05/12/1997	Riyadh	IT242	Dr Fahad

Answer 1

Data Fragmentation takes place when a memory data collection is split into many fragments that are not like each other. It is usually the result of trying to insert into storage a large object which has already suffered from external fragmentation. Data Fragmentation is used for providing distribution transparency of the data over the database systems. Basically, there are three types of data fragmentation.

Horizontal Data Fragmentation:

In this data or records are fragmented horizontally which means data is generated and stored in DDB in various databases of horizontal fragments.

Vertical Data Fragmentation:

In this data or records are fragmented vertically which means data is generated and stored in DDB in various databases of vertical fragments.

Mixed Data Fragmentation:

It is the combination of horizontal and Vertical data fragmentation.

For the given table we can fragment the table of student into three fragments based on the branch.

As there are three unique branches in the table so we can segregate the table in three fragments listed below-

1)Abha

2)Jeddah

3)Riyadh

The three fragments are displayed before-