DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS - Essay Example

Due to time limitation, this problem has not been resolved yet and therefore, the application still requires to be fine tuned to allow it to be run through IIS rather than involving Visual Studio’s internal ASP.NET Development Server. Currently, this application’s backend, SQL Server 2005, does not store any data locally. It simply contains two linked servers which are called whenever the application requires carrying out some data operation – viewing, inserting and updating records. Excessive communication with linked servers may result in increase of network traffic, hence, minimizing the performance of only the application itself but of the entire corporate network as well.

Therefore, it is very important to maintain some part of the data locally in SQL Server 2005 in order to reduce the network load by minimizing the communication with remote servers. This can be achieved through re-designing the database involving three key aspects – data fragmentation, data replication and data allocation. Data Fragmentation refers to the process of breaking up the database into logical units called fragments which can be stored at different sites. The simplest logical units are the table themselves (Padigela, n.d.).

Fragmented or Partitioned refers to partitioning of database into disjoint fragments, with each fragment assigned to one site (no replication). This is also called ‘non-redundant allocation’ (Padigela, n.d.). Complete Replication involves maintenance of a complete copy of database at each site (no fragmentation) and therefore, storage costs and communication costs for updates are main drawbacks of this strategy. To overcome this, snapshots – a copy of the data at a given time – are used to update copies of database periodically (Padigela, n.d.).

It was not easy to work on this coursework as it was extremely challenging and