A new framework for handling mobile clients in a client-server database system

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.