Primary Investigators
Mostafa Ammar
Sham Navathe
Wai Gen Yee
Additional Investigators
Anindya Datta
Saby Mitra
Alumni
Michael Donnahoo
Sameer Mahajan
Related areas
distributed databases, client-server databases, database grouping, database design, database partial replication, database synchronization
Description
This research addresses an environment where a centralized server database serves a large number of geographically scattered clients that are interacting with the server only on an occasional basis. Each client carries a subset of the server database the user needs - typically a small fraction, but would like to have it refreshed" and synchronized with the server whenever the client connects with the server. This scenario is becoming increasingly common among pharmaceutical sales forces, financial planners/advisors, insurance claim adjusters, services salesmen, maintenance personnel etc. The client may collectupdates during their work activity that must be shipped to the server whenever they connect - generally only for 30 to 40 minutes a day. Furthermore, the client is not reachable during their normal period of activity. We call this scenario as "intermittently synchronized databases (ISDB's)". We proposed an aggregation approach in an earlier paper (Mahajan et al., ICDE 1998) consisting of grouping the server data and having clients subscribe to the groups so as to improve the scalability in terms of dealing with a large set of clients with different data requirements.
Publications
W. Yee, S.B. Navathe, A. Datta, S. Mitra, "Grouping design to improve server scalability in intermittently synchronized databases", (submitted for review, Feb., 1999)
S. Mahajan, M. J. Donahoo, S.B. Navathe, M. Ammar, S. Malik, "Grouping Techniques for Update Propagation in Intermittently Connected Databases," in Proceedings of the IEEE 14th Int. Conf. on Data Engineering , Orlando, FL, February 1998.