Mobile computing is a new emerging paradigm that enables mobile computers t
o access information regardless of their physical location. Data management
in this paradigm poses many challenging problems to the database community
. One of these research problems is disconnection management. While in the
case of file systems there are already decent implementations of systems th
at support disconnected operation allowing mobile clients to continue their
work in the absence of the connection to the server, in the case of databa
se systems the majority of the issues regarding the support for disconnecte
d operation are still open research problems. In this paper we propose a ne
w framework for handling mobile clients in a client-server database system.
In order to support disconnected operation data must be preloaded into the
mobile client's cache. This process, called data hoarding, is essential si
nce the mobile client can use during disconnections only the data cached lo
cally. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.