Parallel And Distributed Databases Homework Help

The maturation of database management system (DBMS) technologies offers coincided along with significant developments within distributed computing as well as parallel processing systems. The outcome may be the emergence of distributed database management systems and parallel database management systems. These systems have started to become the dominating data management resources for highly data-intensive programs.

There are numerous associated with determining features from the distributed and parallel DBMS technology.

1. The distributed/parallel database is a database, not some “collection” associated with files that may be individually saved from each node of a computer network. This is the distinction between a DDB and a collection of files handled with a distributed file system. To form a DDB, distributed data should be logically related, where the relationship is defined according to some structural formalism (e.g., the relational model) and access to data should be at a high level via a common interface.
   
   
2. The system has the full functionality of a DBMS. It is neither, as indicated above, a distributed file program, nor is it a transaction processing system. Transaction processing is only one of the functions provided by such a system, which also provides features for example query processing, structured organization of data and others that transaction processing systems do not necessarily deal with.
   
   
3. The distribution associated with data across multiple site/processors is not visible to the customers. This is known as transparency. The distributed/parallel database technologies extends the concept of data independence, which is a central notion of database management, to environments where data are distributed and replicated over a number of machines connected by a network. This is provided by several forms of transparency: network transparency, replication transparency and fragmentation transparency. Transparent access means that users are provided with a single logical image of the database even though it may be physically distributed, enabling them to access the distributed database as if it were a centralized one. In its ideal form, full transparency would imply a query language interface to the distributed/parallel DBMS which is no different from that of a centralized DBMS. Transparency concerns tend to be more pronounced in the case of distributed DBMS. There are a two fundamental reasons for this. First of all, the multiprocessor system on which a parallel DBMS is implemented is controlled by a single operating system. Therefore, the operating system can be structured to implement some aspects of DBMS functionality thereby providing some degree of transparency. Secondly, software development on parallel systems is supported by parallel programming languages which can provide further transparency.

Centralized versus distributed DBMS