Unbundled RTDBMS Support for WWW-Applications

Abstract

Electronic commerce is an emerging, competitive application domain [1]. The importance of the Internet as a communication infrastructure for electronic commerce is increasing since its commercialization [2]. In 1994 sales on the Internet totaled $60 million and in 1995 $200 million. For the year 2000 sales are estimated between $70 billion and $200 billion [3]. The WWW is becoming a dominant technology due to seamless integration of different types of data from different information sources such as ftp-servers, http-servers, or database servers [1]. A wide range of electronic commerce applications need support from databases for data and transaction management. In particular, unbundled time-cognizant database services are required to provide the necessary quality of service the users expect. Quality of service includes responsiveness, predictability, tailorability and control over responses from the server in case of overload. This problem cannot be solved by databases in which performance criteria are solely based on throughput. The advent of new communication technology more and more offloads the responsibility for providing a certain quality of service on the web-server and data servers. Optic fiber is gaining ground for public and private networks and ISDN offers high bandwidth and short call set-up times. ATM technology is employed to meet the requirements for transmission of multimedia data. Interoperability with the TCP/IP protocol suite allows for using ATM networks in applications based on Internet protocols [4]. Thus significance of cost is shifting toward the process of building up the requested information.