CS848 Paper Review Form - Fall 2006
Paper Title: A Method for transparent admission control and request scheduling
	     in E-Commerce Web Sites

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [X] Yes
 [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [X] Good 
 [ ] Marginal (very incremental)
 [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [X] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [ ] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [X] Very significant
 [ ] Significant
 [ ] Marginal significance.
 [ ] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [X] Very well written
 [ ] Generally well written
 [ ] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (very high quality)
 [X] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (marginal, willing to accept but wouldn't argue for it)
 [ ] Weak Reject (marginal, probably reject)
 [ ] Reject (would argue for rejection)

7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)

The main contribution of this paper is that it presents a very simple and
easy to implement admission control technique for data related requests. 
The elegance of the proposed solution lies in the fact that it requires 
no change to the existing 3-tier framework. The middleware solution as 
brought forward has little overhead (implementation and maintainance costs) 
and  demonstrably provides a significant overall improvement in throughput.

I would argue for this paper's acceptance because it proves that there is
still room to enhance the performance and scalability of existing database 
systems by simply thinking outside the box (with the box being the database 
management system). 

8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)

S1 - Simplicity of the proposed idea with very few assumptions

S2 - Low cost of overhead associated with implementing the
proposed new layer of admission control.

s3 - The technique can be easily applied to a distributed/replicated
database enviornment.

9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)

W1 - Offline approach to measuring capacity as described in the paper
can be very time consuming. The 'capacity' of system can vary 
depending on too many factors making it harder to benchmark a given system.

W2 = All the problems of a black box approach to measuring feedback 
are unavoidable. For example a database could have incoming requests from 
various  application servers, some of which do not employ such an admission 
control stragtegy. Although the paper acknowledges this as a possibility 
it does directly not address the consequences or its implications.

w3 - The technique of admission control and scheduling disregards the
nature (priority/urgency) of individual queries.

10) Detailed comments for authors.

None. This was well written paper and I dont think it can be improved further
without digressing from the core idea being presented. The above mentioned
weaknesses could perhaps be addressed in different paper.