Despite the significant ongoing work in the development of new database systems, many of the basic architectural and performance tradeoffs involved in their design have not previously been explored in a systematic manner. The designers of the various systems have adopted a wide range of strategies in areas such as process structure, client-server interaction, concurrency control, transaction management and memory management. This monograph investigates several fundamental aspects of the emerging generation of database systems. It describes and investigates implementation techniques to provide high performance and scalability while maintaining the transaction semantics, reliability and availability associated with more traditional database architectures. The common theme of the techniques developed here is the exploitation of client resources through caching-based data replication. This work should be a value to those interested in the performance and architecture of distributed information systems in general and object-based database management systems in particular.
It provides useful information for designers of such systems, as well as for practitioners who need to understand the inherent tradeoffs among the architectural alternatives in order to evaluate existing systems. Furthermore, many of the issues addressed in this book are relevant to other systems beyond the ODBMS domain. Such systems include shared-disk parallel database systems, distributed file systems, and distributed virtual memory systems. The presentation is suitable for practitioners and advanced students in all of these areas, although a basic understanding of database transaction semantics and techniques is assumed.