In this part, you are asked to explore and/or investigate distributed database management system (DDBMS). You can either explore the main concepts or technical challenges of DDBMS in general (without directly specifying a certain DBMS) or you can research a specific DBMS and present how it manages different aspects of distribution.
Your exploration or research should focus on an in-depth review of theories, techniques, algorithms, approaches, mechanisms, and implementation of one or some of the following aspects:
- Distributed database support in systems such as Cassandra, Clusterpoint, SQL Server, Oracle, FoundationDB, NuoDB, etc.
- Distributed DBMS architecture: models for distributed DBMS, Distributed systems architectures, etc.
- Distributed database design: distribution design issues, fragmentation/partition, allocation issues, etc.
- Query decomposition and data localization.
- Distributed database security.
- Distributed concurrency control.
- Distributed DBMS reliability
Your topic could also investigate a sub-problem of a cutting-edge research problem with these aspects.
Your investigation will be based on recent papers, technical documents, and software packages (open source preferred). You are encouraged to read some papers from the following sites for new techniques in DBMS:
- Communications of the ACM
- CiteSeer
- IEEE electronic library
- IGI Global electronic library
Once you have decided on a topic, you need to set up the feasible yet meaningful outcomes of your exploration or research on it. Overall, the outcomes should be interesting and beneficial to the professional community of DBMS research and development. Some possible outcomes are:
- your analysis, findings and discoveries of problems
- results of your test, survey and comparison
- your proposed new or improved methods, algorithms, etc.
- your useful implementation
- your insight on future directions.
You are asked to write a report of 5 to 10 pages maximum. It should be in a technical report or conference paper format, and include the following contents:
- Title
- Abstract: no more than 300 words.
- Introduction/background: motivation and overall introduction, including necessary literature review and citations.
- Methods: describe the problem, and the methods you use to explore or address the problem.
- Results and findings: include experimental, theoretical analysis, and implementation accomplished based on your methods.
- Related work: summarize the related work; compare your methods and results with others’ work. Citations are required.
- Conclusion and future work: end your exploration and research by pointing out possible directions.
- References: include all cited references.
Make sure you include proper citation of viewpoints, methods, algorithms, data, results, figures, tables, etc. from other papers or contributions whenever you use them in your report. All your references should be published, or at least publicly and stably accessible from the Internet.
In addition to the report, you can also submit any necessary complementary material you have such as practical results, code of programs you have done, and other support packages.
