(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1999)
Omiecinski, Edward; Navathe, Shamkant B.; Ammar, Mostafa H.; Donahoo, Michael J.; Malik, Sanjoy; Yee, Wai Gen
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.