Lecture 2

Distributed Database Promises

 Distributed Database Promises

Distributed Database Systems deliver the

following advantages:
• Transparency
• Higher reliability
• Improved performance
• Easier system expansion
 Transparency

• The distributed systems should be perceived

as a single entity by the users or the
application programmers rather than as a
collection of autonomous systems, which are
cooperating. The users should be unaware of
where the services are located and also the
transferring from a local machine to a remote
one should also be transparent.
 Types of Transparency
• Access Transparency
• Location Transparency
• Concurrency Transparency
• Replication Transparency
• Failure Transparency
• Migration Transparency
• Performance Transparency
• Scaling Transparency
 Access Transparency

• Clients should be unaware of the distribution

of the files. The files could be present on a
totally different set of servers which are
physically distant apart and a single set of
operations should be provided to access these
remote as well as the local files.
• Example: Network File System (NFS), SQL
queries, and Navigation of the web
 Location Transparency
• Enables resources to be accessed without
knowledge of their physical or network location
(for example, which building or IP address).
• Files or group of files can be relocated without
changing their path names.
• As an example of a lack of access transparency,
consider a distributed system that does not allow
you to access files on a remote computer unless
you make use of the ftp program to do so.
 Concurrency Transparency
• Users and Applications should be able to
access shared data or objects without
interference between each other. This
requires very complex mechanisms in a
distributed system. The shared objects are
accessed simultaneously.
 Replication Transparency
• This kind of transparency should be mainly
incorporated for the distributed file systems,
which replicate the data at two or more sites
for more reliability. The client generally should
not be aware that a replicated copy of the
data exists.
 FAILURE TRANSPERANCY
• Enables the concealment of faults, allowing
users and application programs to complete
their tasks despite the failure of hardware or
software components.
• The distributed system are more liable to
failures as any of the component may fail
which may lead to degraded service or the
total absence of that service.
 Mobility transparency
• allows the movement of resources(i.e.
information or processes) and clients within a
system without affecting the operation of
users or programs.
 Performance transparency
• allows the system to be reconfigured to
improve performance
• Scaling transparency
allows the system and applications to
expand in scale without change to the system
structure or the application algorithms. e as
loads vary.
 Higher reliability
• Replication of components
• No single points of failure
e.g., a broken communication link or
processing element does not bring down the
entire system
• Distributed transaction processing guarantees
the consistency of the database and
concurrency
 Improved performance
• Improved performance through database
replication (i.e. storing database objects in
multiple databases which increase availability
and performance).
• Reduces remote access delays
 Improved performance
• Distributed systems provide a high degree of
availability in the face of hardware faults. The
availability of a system is a measure of the
proportion of time that it is available for use.
When one of the components in a distributed
system fails, only the work that was using the
failed component is affected. A user may
move to another computer if the one that
they were using fails; a server process can be
started on another computer.
 Easier system expansion
• Issue is database scaling
• Emergence of microprocessor and workstation
technologies – Network of workstations much
cheaper than a single mainframe computer
• Data communication cost versus
telecommunication cost
• Increasing database size
 DDBMS ISSUES
• Complexity
• Cost
• Security
• Integrity control more difficult
• Lack of standards
• Lack of experience
• Database design more complex
 Technical Problems
Distributed database design
How to fragment the data?
Partitioned data vs. replicated data?
Distributed query processing
Design algorithms that analyze queries and convert them into a series
of data manipulation operations – Distribution of data,
communication costs, etc. has to be considered
Find optimal query plans
Distributed concurrency control
Synchronization of concurrent accesses such that the integrity of the
DB is maintained – Integrity of multiple copies of (parts of) the DB
have to be considered (mutual consistency)
Reliability – How to make the system resilient to
failures – Atomicity and Durability
Heterogeneous databases – If there is no
homogeneity among the DBs at various sites
either in terms of the way data is logically
structured (data model) or in terms of the
access mechanisms (language), it becomes
necessary to provide translation mechanisms