Techniques for update handling in the enhanced client-server DBMS

The Client-Server computing paradigm has significantly influenced the way modern Database Management Systems are designed and built. In such systems, clients maintain data pages in their main-memory caches, originating from the server's database. The Enhanced Client-Server architecture takes advantage of all the available client resources, including their long-term memory. Clients can cache server data into their own disk units if these data are part of their operational spaces. However, when updates occur at the server, a number of clients may need to not only be notified about these changes, but also obtain portions of the updates as well. In this paper, we examine the problem of managing server imposed updates that affect data cached on client disk managers. We propose a number of server update propagation techniques in the context of the Enhanced Client-Server DBMS architecture, and examine the performance of these strategies through detailed simulation experiments. In addition, we study how the various settings of the network affect the performance of these policies.