  In this paper we tackle the fragmentation problem for highly distributed
databases. In such an environment, a suitable fragmentation strategy may
provide scalability and availability by minimizing distributed transactions. We
propose an approach for XML fragmentation that takes as input both the
application's expected workload and a storage threshold, and produces as output
an XML fragmentation schema. Our workload-aware method aims to minimize the
execution of distributed transactions by packing up related data in a small set
of fragments. We present experiments that compare alternative fragmentation
schemas, showing that the one produced by our technique provides a
finer-grained result and better system throughput.
