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 offered services. This paper discusses performance and scalability issues for back-end parallel or distributed database servers used in e-commerce applications. We argue that database scalability cannot be achieved without considering efficient data placement. In particular data distribution strategies should consider the specifics of e-commerce applications and user expectations in terms of quality of service. We propose a generic data distribution strategy integrating user class information.