Architecture and Performance of Large and Disperse Distributed Object Base Systems

Introduction Most object-oriented database systems and persistent object stores have been constructed in a workstation-server environment in which client workstations are connected to the server machines by a local-area network (e.g., an Ethernet). The servers are responsible for the persistent and consistent storage of the object base and for preventing unauthorized access to the data. Application programs are carried out on the client workstations to exploit the resources of the workstations and to avoid computation on servers, the potential bottlenecks of the system. Typically, object-oriented databases have been used in very computation-intensive and/or highly interactive applications (e.g., engineering applications), and therefore, techniques such as pointer swizzling [Mos92, KK95] have been used to speed up the processing of persistent objects at workstations. In this environment, scalabilty means that an arbitrary number of client workstations can be connected to the s