Estimating the Cost of Updates in a Relational Database

In this paper, cost formulas are derived for the updates of data and indexes in a relational database. The costs depend on the data scan type and the predicates involved in the update statements. We show that update costs have a considerable influence, both in the context of the physical database design problem and in access path selection in query optimization for relational DBMSs. © 1985, ACM. All rights reserved.