Principles for Distributed Databases in Telecom Environment

Abstract: Centralized databases are becoming bottleneck for organizations that are physically distributed and access data remotely. Data management is easy in centralized databases. However, it carries high communication cost and most importantly high response time. The concept of distributing the data over various locations is very attractive for such organizations. In such cases the database is fragmented into fragments and distributed to the locations where it is needed. This kind of distribution provides local control of data and the data access is also very fast in such databases. However, concurrency control, query optimization and data allocations are the factors that affect the response time and must be investigated prior to implementing distributed databases. This thesis makes the use of mixed method approach to meet its objective. In quantitative section, we performed an experiment to compare the response time of two databases; centralized and fragmented/distributed. The experiment was performed at Ericsson. A literature review was also done to find out other important response time related issues like query optimization, concurrency control and data allocation. The literature review revealed that these factors can further improve the response time in distributed environment. Results of the experiment showed a substantial decrease in the response time due to the fragmentation and distribution.