N etwork-based computing domain unifies all best research efforts
presented from single computer systems to networked systems to render
overwhelming computational power for several modern day applications.
Although this power is expected to grow with respect to time due to
tech- nological advancements, application requirements impose a
continuous thrust on network utilization and on the resources to deliver
supreme quality of service. Strictly speaking, network-based computing
dornain has no confined scope and each element offers considerable
challenges. Any modern day networked application strongly thrives on
efficient data storage and management system, which is essentially a
Database System. There have been nurnber of books-to-date in this domain
that discuss fundamental principles of designing a database systern.
Research in this dornain is now far matured and rnany researchers are
venturing in this dornain continuously due to a wide variety of
challenges posed. In this book, our dornain of interest is in exposing
the underlying key challenges in designing algorithms to handle
unpredictable requests that arrive at a Distributed Database
System(DDBS) and evaluating their performance. These requests are
otherwise called as on-line requests arriving at a system to process.
Transactions in an on-line Banking service, Airline Reservation systern,
Video-on-Demand systern, etc, are few examples of on-line requests.