Designing a distributed database on a local area network: a methodology and decision support system
Local area networks (LANs) are important for an enterprise to hold a competitive edge. Many companies have therefore converted terminal-based computing systems to LAN-based distributed data processing systems. This paper proposes a design methodology for distributed databases connected by a LAN. Two primary objectives of the methodology are: (i) to allocate data files and workload among heterogeneous servers; and (ii) to determine the number of servers to satisfy the response time required for processing each transaction. The file and workload allocation decision is formulated as a nonlinear zeroone integer programming problem. This problem is proven to be NP-complete. A heuristic is developed to solve this problem effectively. A decision support system is implemented and an example is solved to illustrate the practical usefulness of the system.
distributed database local area network decision support system file and workload allocation nonlinear integer programming local processing overhead server service capacity