Data Distribution Strategies for Providing Database Scalability in E-commerce Applications

The number of users of e-commerce applications is increasing, and users are becoming more and more sensitive to the quality of the ofSered services. This paper discusses performance and scalability issues for back-end parallel or distributed database servers used in ecommerce applications. We argue that database scalability rannot be achieved without considering eflcient data placement. In particular data distribution strategies yhould consider the specqics of e-cornmerce applications and user expectations in ternis of quality of service. We propose a generic data distribution strategy integrating user class information.