Buffer Management in Distributed Database Systems: A Data Mining-Based Approach

In this paper, we propose a data mining-based approach to public buffer management in distributed database systems where database buffers are organized into two areas: public and private. While the private buffer areas contain pages to be updated by particular users, the public buffer area contains pages shared among users from different sites. Different from traditional buffer management strategies where limited knowledge of user access patterns is used, the proposed approach discovers knowledge from page access sequences of user transactions and uses it to guide public buffer placement and replacement. The knowledge to be discovered and the discovery algorithms are discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was investigated through a simulation study. The results indicate that with the help of the discovered knowledge, the public buffer hit ratio can be improved significantly.