A Greedy Approach For Improving Update Processing In Intermittently Synchronized Databases

Abstract

Replication of data on portable computers is a new DBMS technology aimed at catering to a growing population of mobile database users. Clients can download data items such as email, or sales data from a server onto these machines, per use it during commutes, and return any modifications to the server at the end of the day. In this paper, we describe how the servers in these systems generally process update information for clients and reveal a scalability problem--server processing increases quadratically with respect to increasing numbers of clients. We develop a cost model, and propose a solution based on heuristics. By aggregating client interests into datagroups, based on notions such as interest overlap, we can reduce server cost. These techniques are attractive because they are simple and computationally cheap. Simulations show that even simple techniques may yield significant performance improvements.