Research in Functionally Distributed Computer Systems Development. Volume XII. Design Considerations in Distributed Data Base Management Systems.

With the advent of Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) and associated facilities (data dictionaries, query languages, report writers, etc.), the task of data organization, management, and storage has been given to a select group of specialists. These specialists (the Data Base Administrators (DBA) provide the necessary control, logging, and access information and software to the program. Such activity relieves the programmers of this overhead function allowing them to concentrate on the necessary manipulations. This paper focuses on some alternatives with respect to a DBMS in terms of a centralized versus decentralized environment. The first section deals with the concepts and tradeoffs involved in considering the two environments. The second section then deals with problems which are encountered in a distributed data base management system. These problems include deadlock, rollback and recovery, data conversion, redundancy, and communication and operating system requirements for effective distribution.