Modeling of multiple copy update costs for file allocation in distributed databases

Abstract

The file allocation problem for distributed databases has been extensively studied in the literature and the objective is to minimize total costs consisting of storage, query and update communication costs. Current modeling of update communication costs is simplistic and does not capture the working of most of the protocols that have been proposed. This paper shows that more accurate modeling of update costs can be achieved fairly easily without an undue increase in the complexity of the formulation. In particular, formulations for two classes of update protocols are shown. Existing heuristics can be used on these formulations to obtain good solutions.