Concept:In a distributed database management system, dividing a relation into smaller pieces for storage across different sites is known as fragmentation.
Explanation:A distributed database stores data on multiple computers or locations connected by a network.
Each location is called a site, and it holds part of the database.
Managing data in one large relation at every site is inefficient and increases network traffic.
Therefore, a large relation is broken into smaller relations or fragments.
Each fragment contains a subset of rows or columns and is assigned to a particular site.
This improves data locality, reduces communication cost, and allows parallel processing.
This process of splitting a relation into smaller parts is specifically called fragmentation.
Replication, in contrast, means copying the same data to multiple sites.
Indexing speeds up search operations, and normalisation organises data to reduce redundancy.
Thus, the correct term is fragmentation.
Answer:B. fragmentation