Introduction

In recent years, powerful technological and market forces have combined to affect a major shift in the nature of computing and data management. These forces have had a profound effect on the requirements for Database Management Systems (DBMSs) and hence, on the way such systems are designed and built. The widespread adoption of client-server architectures has made distributed computing the conventional mode of operation for many application domains. At the same time, new classes of applications and new programming paradigms have placed additional demands on database systems, resulting in an emerging generation of object-based database systems. The combination of these factors gives rise to significant challenges and performance opportunities in the design of modern DBMSs. This book proposes and examines a range of techniques to provide high performance and scalability for these new database systems while maintaining the transaction semantics, reliability, and availability associated with more traditional centralized and distributed DBMSs. The common theme of the techniques developed here is the utilization of client resources through caching-based data replication.