Predicting the behaviour of three-tiered applications: dealing with distributed-object technology and databases

Today's applications are both object-oriented and based on a new type of th ree-tiered client-server architecture with clients, processing servers, and data servers as cornerstones. By recognising these trends, industry and re searchers have been engaged in defining standards and technologies for comm unicating the components of Distributed Information Systems and for providi ng compatible mechanisms to access databases, but a key problem with these complex architectures is still their performance. This paper presents a too l for predicting the performance of systems based on CORBA and DCOM as dist ributed-object architectures, and OLE-DB and PL/SQL as data-access architec tures. The tool is an extension of SMART, a workbench that exploits analyti cal and simulation performance models to predict the performance of databas e applications. (C)2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.