Course Description
The conventional notion of timely and reliable access to global information sources is rapidly hanging. Users have become much more demanding in that they desire and sometimes even require access to information "anytime, anywhere." The extensive diversity in the range of information that is accessible to a user at any given time is also growing at a rapid rate. Furthermore, rapidly expanding technology is making available a wide breadth of devices with different memory, storage, network, power, and display requirements to access this diverse data set.

Classical distributed database systems monolithically offer distribution transparency and higher performance. However, with the advances in technologies this monolithic approach is insufficient. In the new computational environment data distribution issue has been evolved to the data integration from several heterogeneous databases.

Multidatabases are designed to deal with this issue. They are designed to allow timely and reliable access to large amount of heterogeneous and autonomous data sources in an environment that is characterized as "sometime, somewhere." Within the scope of these systems, multidatabase researchers have addressed issues such as autonomy, heterogeneity, transaction management, concurrency control, transparency, and query resolution. These solutions are based upon fixed clients and servers connected over a reliable network infrastructure. However, the concept of mobility, where a user accesses data through a remote connection with a portable device, has introduced additional complexities and restrictions in a multidatabase system. These include:
- A reduced capacity network connection,
- Processing and resource restrictions, and
- Effectively locating and accessing information from a multitude of sources.

A multidatabase system (MDBS) with such additional restrictions is called a mobile data access system (MDAS).

This course extensively discusses multidatabase systems and mobile data access systems, moreover it will studies traditional distributed database issues within the framework of MDBSs and MDASs.

Keywords: Mobile Databases, Wireless communication, Mobile databases, Multidatabases, Query Processing, Transaction Processing, Security, Multimedia databases.

Course Outline
1. Introduction
2. Database System architectures, Transition from Centralized databases to Mobile databases
n, a. Technological advances,
n, b. Technological limitations,
n, c. Networking infrastructure
3. Database issues
n, a. Query Processing
n, b. Transaction processing
n, c. Recovery and Concurrency control
n, d. Security
4. Multidatabases
n, a. Definition
n, b. Issues in multidatabase systems
n, c. Approaches to multidatabase systems
n, d. Query Processing
n, e. Transaction Processing
n, f. Recovery and Concurrency Control
n, g. Security
5. Mobile Data Access systems
n, a. On-demand services
n, b. Broadcast services
n, c. Caching and Data replication
n, d. Query Processing
n, e. Transaction Processing
n, f. Security
6. Case Study, Multimedia multidatabases

Tutorial duration: This tutorial is intended for four hours
Audience: Experts, System designers, Researchers, Graduate Students

Short Bio

A. R. Hurson is a Computer Science and Engineering Faculty at The Pennsylvania State University. His research for the past 20 years has been directed toward the design and analysis of general as well as special purpose computer architectures. His research has been supported by NSF, NCR Corp., DARPA, IBM, Lockheed Martin, ONR, and Penn State University. He has published over 200 technical papers in areas including database systems, multidatabases, global information sharing processing, application of mobile agent technology, object oriented databases, Mobile computing environment, computer architecture and cache memory, parallel and distributed processing, dataflow architectures, and VLSI algorithms. Dr. Hurson served as the Guest Co-Editor of special issues of the IEEE Proceedings on Supercomputing Technology, the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing on Load Balancing and Scheduling, the journal of integrated computer-aided engineering on multidatabase and interoperable systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, and Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications. He is the co-author of the IEEE Tutorials on Parallel Architectures for Database Systems, Multidatabase systems: An advanced solution for global information sharing, Parallel architectures for data/knowledge base systems, and Scheduling and Load Balancing in Parallel and Distributed Systems. He is also the Co-founder of the IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (currently IPDPS).

Professor Hurson has been active in various IEEE/ACM Conferences and has given tutorials for various conferences on global information sharing, dataflow processing, database management systems, supercomputer technology, data/knowledge-based systems, scheduling and load balancing, and parallel computing. He served as a member of the IEEE Computer Society Press Editorial Board, an IEEE Distinguished speaker, and editor of IEEE transactions on computers. Currently, he is serving in the IEEE/ACM Computer Sciences Accreditation Board and as an ACM lecturer. Hurson can be reached at hurson@cse.psu.edu.