Towards database scalability through efficient data distribution in e-commerce environments

Increasing Web traffic in e-commerce applications poses great challenges to database servers. On one hand, database servers should be able to scale; on the other, end users are becoming more and more sensitive to the quality of offered services. This requires addressing issues such as pushing quality of service (QoS) requirements into database processing and providing database system scalability. In this paper, we discuss scalability issues for back-end database servers used in e-commerce applications. We argue that database scalability cannot be achieved without considering efficient data placement. That leads us to consider the specifics of e-commerce applications as well as user QoS requirements. We propose a generic data distribution strategy integrating user class information and application characteristics. We also present experiments we have conducted to provide practical guidelines to our strategy and to study the impact of data distribution on the behavior of database system in e-commerce applications.