Principles of Distributed Database Systems, Third Edition

• Introduction
• Errata
• Presentation Slides
• Solutions to Exercises

The third edition is finally out... It has been ten years since the release of the second edition -- it took a while, but we are very happy with the results. Through this site, we will make available presentation slides, solutions to some of the exercises, and (hopefully few) errors. These are accessible through the links on the left. The slides are downloadable by anyone and they are also available from Springer site (click here). However, access to solutions to exercises is restricted to those academics who have adopted the book for a course. Therefore, we ask you to register and provide some evidence of the course adoption. We also ask you not to put the solutions online in any format or to distribute them to anyone who may then post them online.

The book is almost a complete re-write. We kept the fundamental principles that have been there since the first edition, but they are updated. The end result is a book that has been heavily revised -- while we maintained and updated the core chapters, we have also added new ones. The major changes are the following:

1. Database integration and querying is now treated in much more detail, reflecting the attention these topics have received in the community in the past decade. There is one chapter that focuses on the integration process, while another chapter discusses querying over multidatabase systems.
2. The previous editions had only brief discussion of data replication protocols. This topic is now covered in a separate chapter where we provide an in-depth discussion of the protocols and how they can be integrated with transaction management.
3. Peer-to-peer data management is discussed in depth. These systems have become an important and interesting architectural alternative to classical distributed database systems. Although the early distributed database systems architectures followed the peer-to-peer paradigm, the modern incarnation of these systems have fundamentally different characteristics, so they deserve in-depth discussion in a chapter of their own.
4. Web data management is covered in one chapter of its own. This is a difficult topic to cover since there is no unifying framework. We discuss various aspects of the topic ranging from web models to search engines to distributed XML processing.
5. Earlier editions contained a chapter where we discussed "recent issues" at the time. In this edition, we again have a similar chapter where we cover stream data management and cloud computing. These topics are still in a flux and are subjects of considerable ongoing research. We highlight the issues and the potential research directions.

The resulting manuscript strikes a balance between our two objectives, namely to address new and emerging issues, and maintain the main characteristics of the book in addressing the principles of distributed data management.

The third edition is coming out at a time when there is renewed interest in distributed data management. The last ten years have seen an accelerated investigation of distributed data management technologies spurred by advent of high-speed networks, fast commodity hardware, very heavy parallelization of hardware, interest in cloud computing, and, of course, the increasing pervasiveness of the web. We hope the book contributes the the renewed discussion on these topics.

As always, we would very much like to hear from you. Let us know what you think we did right and what we got wrong; what you would like to be included in the next edition and what no longer needs to be included. Of course, let us know if you discover any errors.

M. Tamer Özsu (tamer.ozsu@uwaterloo.ca)
Patrick Valduriez (Patrick.Valduriez@inria.fr)