Active Replication and Update of Content in Electronic Commerce

Alok R. Chaturvedi, Ashok K. Choubey, and Jinsheng Roan
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 4, Number 3, Spring 2000, pp. 45.


Abstract: This paper describes a strategy for actively replicating and updating content for electronic commerce. Active replication and updating of content is achieved by intelligent agents (IA) using a time-invariant fragmentation approach to partitioning and replicating data in a distributed computing environment. Taking into account the time-sensitivity property of data, IAs derive time-invariant fragments for their respective nodes from the query history. A time-invariant fragment (TIF) is that portion of the database whose values do not change during a specified time interval. The algorithm that IAs use in creating TIFs for each node, for a given time interval, is presented. The active replication approach is compared with three other approaches, full-replication, nonreplication, and materialized view, in terms of data transmission costs. Results indicate that the active approach can be most effective for electronic commerce because of the high percentage of modification queries, the large size of the network, and the great number of transactions.

Key Words and Phrases
: Client-server computing, distributed systems, electronic commerce, intelligent agents.