Steven Alter

This paper discusses a model for finding an efficient implementation of a business application system whose logical specifications have been determined in advance. The model views file and program design as a problem of systematically coordinating the configurations of datasets and computations. It uses a straightforward search technique to determine aggregations of computations, aggregations of datasets, device, organization, and key order for each dataset, key order for each computation, and access method for each dataset-computation pair. Although computational results are presented for a sample problem involving 54 computations and 49 datasets, the main point of the paper is that the underlying model works computationally and is simple enough to be adapted to many file design situations.