Data (1987)
Abstract:
Abstract: Distributed database software offers transparent access to data-- no matter where in the network the data is located, an authorized program can access the data as though it is local. This article argues that transparency in a geographically distributed system is unmanageable and has technical drawbacks. The real virtue of transparency is its ability to support geographically centralized clusters of computers. + This paper originally appeared in UNIX Review, V.5, N.2, May 1987, pp. 42-50. 2 Distributed database software offers transparent access to data-- no matter where in the network the data is located, an authorized program can access the data as though it is local. Transparency has been the goal of distributed database systems for over a decade-- it is at the core of next-generation distributed database systems. Both IBM's CICS/ISC [1] and Tandem's Encompass [2] have offered transparency since 1976. Although these two distributed systems are very popular, their ability to transparently access remote data is not used much. In fact, design experts of both vendors recommend against transparent remote access to data [3]; instead, they recommend a requester-server design (sometimes called remote procedure call) in which requests for remote data are sent to a server which accesses its local data to service the request (see figure 1). Ironically, CICS and Encompass initially offered only transparent distributed data. Both added a requester-server model about three years later (1979).
Citations
| 1 | Four Case Studies of Distributed Systems – Anderton, Gray - 1986 |
