DB-Enabled Peers for Managing Distributed Data

摘要

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is the sharing of computer resources, services and information by direct negotiation and exchange between autonomous and heterogeneous systems. An alternative approach to distributed and parallel computing, known as Grid Computing, has also emerged, with a similar intent of scaling the system performance and availability by sharing resources. Like P2P computing, Grid Computing has been popularized by the need for resource sharing and consequently, it rides on existing underlying organizational structure. In this paper, we compare P2P and Grid computing to highlight some of their differences. We then examine the issues of P2P distributed data sharing systems, and how database applications can ride on P2P technology. We use our Best-Peer project, which is an on-going peer-based data management system, as an example to illustrate what P2P computing can do for database management.