Grouping Techniques for Update Propagation in Intermittently Connected Databases

We consider an environment where one or more servers carry databases that are of interest to a community of clients. The clients are only intermittently connected to the server for brief periods of time. Clients carry a part of the database for their own processing and accumulate local updates while disconnected. We call this the Intermittently Connected Database (ICDB) environment. ICDBs have a wide variety of applications including sales force automation, insurance claim processing, and mobile work forces. Our focus in the paper is on the problem of update propagation at the server in ICDBs and the associated processing at the clients. The typical clientcentric approach involves the communication and processing of updates and transactions on a per-client basis, ignoring the overlap of data between clients. The complexity of this approach is on the order of the number of connecting clients, thereby limiting the scalability of the server. We propose a data-centric approach which clust...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Sameer Mahajan, Michael J. Donahoo, Shamkant B. Navathe, Mostafa H. Ammar, Sanjoy Malik
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 1998, Insurance Claim Processing, Server Processing Complexity, Typical Clientcentric Approach