Many of today’s data intensive applications have the common need to access exceedingly large databases in a shared fashion, simultaneously with many other copies of themselves or similar applications. Often these multiple instantiations of the client application are geographically distributed, and therefore access the database over wide area networks. As the size of these ‘industrial strength’ databases continue to rise, particularly in the arena of Internet, Intranet and Multimedia servers, performance problems due to poor scalabilty are commonplace. . | Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques. Edited by David W. Corne Martin J. Oates George D. Smith Copyright 2000 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-471-98855-3 Hardback 0-470-84163X Electronic 14 Exploring Evolutionary Approaches to Distributed Database Management Martin J. Oates and David Corne Introduction Many of today s data intensive applications have the common need to access exceedingly large databases in a shared fashion simultaneously with many other copies of themselves or similar applications. Often these multiple instantiations of the client application are geographically distributed and therefore access the database over wide area networks. As the size of these industrial strength databases continue to rise particularly in the arena of Internet Intranet and Multimedia servers performance problems due to poor scalabilty are commonplace. Further there are availability and resilience risks associated with storing all data in a single physical data warehouse and many systems have emerged to help improve this by distributing the data over a number of dispersed servers whilst still presenting the appearance of a single logical database The Internet is a large scale distributed file system where vast amounts of highly interconnected data are distributed across many number of geographically dispersed nodes. It is interesting to note that even individual nodes are increasingly being implemented as a cluster or farm of servers. These dispersed systems are a distinct improvement over monolithic databases but usually still rely on the notion of fixed master slave relationships mirrors between copies of the data at fixed locations with static access configurations. For fixed systems initial file distribution design can still be complex and indeed evolutionary Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques edited by D. Corne . Oates and . Smith 2000 John Wiley Sons Ltd 236 Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and
