With the growth of information technology and computer networks, there is a vital need for optimal design of distributed databases with the aim of performance improvement in terms of minimizing the round-trip response time and query transmission and processing costs. To address this issue, new fragmentation, data allocation, and replication techniques are required. In this paper, we propose enhanced vertical fragmentation, allocation, and replication schemes to improve the performance of distributed database systems. The proposed fragmentation scheme clusters highly-bonded attributes (i.e., normally accessed together) into a single fragment in order to minimize the query processing cost. The allocation scheme is proposed to find an optimized allocation to minimize the round-trip response time. The replication scheme partially replicates the fragments to increase the local execution of queries in a way that minimizes the cost of transmitting replicas to the sites. Experimental results show that, on average, the proposed schemes reduce the round-trip response time of queries by 23% and query processing cost by 15%, as compared to the related work.

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