Most organizations with non-trivial data processing needs—including virtually all medium and large businesses and corporations—rely on enterprise application software (EAS), e.g.,CRM, SCM, and ERP, for their data processing and analysis. These EAS applications generally run on top of a DBMS, which handles the actual storage and retrieval of data. The performance of the underlying DBMS—i.e., its ability to process large amounts of data within an acceptable amount of time—is t