Multimedia databases store high-volume data, which causes problems in efficient information retrieval, and increases execution costs and response times of the queries. To solve this problem, data fragmentation techniques exist to improve query performance, increase information availability, and efficiently execute more operations accessing less irrelevant data. This article presents a comprehensive review of 34 methods related to hybrid fragmentation and subsequently proposes the design of a hybrid fragmentation method that adapts the scheme according to workload changes to maintain efficient retrieval of multimedia data. The proposed technologies are Java as a programming language, Java Server Faces (JSF) as a framework, MySQL and MongoDB database management systems, and NetBeans as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), following the UWE methodology (Unified Modeling Language-based Web Engineering).

The volume of multimedia data generated by various applications is increasing constantly. These data are complex to process, hindering efficient information retrieval because database operations require analyzing an entire database during their execution, augmenting the query execution costs and response times. In a distributed environment, fragmentation is an effective technique that aims to improve query performance and increase the availability of information. Most methods address horizontal or vertical partitioning and are static because they cannot adapt the fragmentation scheme to new changes in database access patterns or elements (attributes and/or tuples). This work presents a dynamic hybrid fragmentation method for multimedia databases that includes an observer–fragmenter developed in the Java programming language and uses the NoSQL (Not only SQL) MongoDB database. To implement the proposed method, it is first necessary to carry out static hybrid fragmentation through the XAMANA Web application. Then, the observer–fragmenter is executed, which is capable of analyzing the fragment costs and monitoring the operation and performance thresholds without the intervention of the Database Administrator (DBA). When the cost of a fragment exceeds the thresholds, a new hybrid fragmentation is automatically triggered, and new fragments are allocated to the corresponding sites. Finally, to validate our proposed method, we conduct a case study using the HITO (History of the Technological Institute of Orizaba) database and compare our method with three state-of-the-art approaches. The results show that it is possible to reduce the execution cost of 77% of queries by accessing less remote data and requiring fewer joins.