CASE STUDY

"Pine Valley Furniture

Alex Schuster began Pine Valley Furniture as a hobby. Initially, Alex would build custom
furniture in his garage for friends and family. As word spread about his quality
craftsmanship, he began taking orders. The hobby has since evolved into a medium-
sized business, employing more than 50 workers.

Over the years, increased demand has forced Alex to relocate several times, increase
his sales force, expand his product line, and renovate manual systems on which they
were modeled. In an effort to improve its information systems, PVF recently renovated
its information systems, resulting in a company-wide database and applications that
work with this database. Pine Valley Furniture’s computer-based applications are
primarily in the accounting and financial areas. All applications have been built in-house,
and when necessary, new information systems staff is hired to support Pine Valley
Furniture’s expanding information systems.

Pine Valley Furniture has opened up another office for receiving and processing orders.
This office will deal exclusively with customers west of the Mississippi River. The order
processing center located at the manufacturing plant will process orders for customers
west of the Mississippi River as well as international customers. All products will still be
shipped to customers from the manufacturing facility; thus, inventory levels must be
accessed and updated from both offices."

Q1. Would you recommend a distributed database or a centralized database?

Explain you answer.

A distributed database system consists of a collection of local databases,

geographically located in different points (nodes of a network of computers) and
logically related by functional relations so that they can be viewed globally as a single
database

A major advantage of using a distributed database is that by sharing a database across

multiple nodes can obtain a storage space extension and also can benefit from multiple
processing resources. Although computational power has greatly increased in recent
years, large data processing can lead to overall poor performance. By distributing data
over multiple processing centers can obtain major performance advantages due to
parallel data processing across multiple nodes, but keeping transactions ACID
properties is much harder to achieve. In addition, distributed database systems offer
other additional advantages:

• Reflects the organizational structure of many organizations, given the fact that
many companies are “distributed” geographically;

• Increased reliability and availability. A distributed database system is robust to

failure to some extent. Hence, it is reliable when compared to a centralized database
system;
• Local control. The data is distributed in such a way that every portion of it is local
to some sites (servers). The site in which the portion of data is stored is the owner of the
data;

• Modular growth (resilient).Growth is easier. We do not need to interrupt any of

the functioning sites to introduce (add) a new site. Hence, the expansion of the whole
system is easier. Removal of a site also does not cause much problems;

• Lower communication costs (more economical).Data are distributed in such a

way that they are available near to the location where they are needed more. This
reduces the communication cost much more compared to a centralized system;

• Faster response. Most of the data are local and in close proximity to where they
are needed. Hence, the requests can be answered quickly compared to a centralized
system;

• Secured management of distributed data. Various transparencies like network

transparency, fragmentation transparency, and replication transparency are
implemented to hide the actual implementation details of the whole distributed system.

• Robust. The system is continued to work in case of failures. For example,

replicated distributed database performs in spite of failure of other sites;

• Compliant with ACID properties. Distributed transactions demands Atomicity,

Consistency, Isolation, and Reliability;

• Improved performance and parallelism in executing transactions can be

achieved.

Q2. Management would like to consider utilizing one centralized database at the
manufacturing facility that can be accessed via a wide area network from the
remote order processing center. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of
this.

In a centralized database model, a core unit acts in a way that serves the entire
company. This description is often used to describe an analytics model which has been
completely centralized, though it may also refer to shared information database which is
accessible to everyone. Companies that are large and have a single-business
organization have a need for information, analytics, and applications to be able to cross
various boundaries. This enhances the communication within the organization,
providing more effective leadership from the C-Suite as specific needs are accurately
related to the specific individuals tasked with a response. Choosing a centralized
system is about funding a way for a unique business strategy to have the most potential
impact.
Advantages of Centralized Database System

1. The integrity of data is increased as the whole database is stored at a single

physical location. In this way, it is easy to manage the data is most consistent and
accurate in this way.
2. The data redundancy is controlled in a centralized database. All the data is
stored in one location and it cannot distribute on different places. So, it is easier to
make sure all the data stored is not duplicate. in this way redundancy easily control
3. The centralized database is much secure. Because all data is stored in one place
4. Data is easily portable because it is stored in the same place. Strong data
security
5. The centralized database is inexpensive than other databases .it required less
expense on maintains
6. All the information is easily accessible. it takes less time to get the required
information from a centralized database

Disadvantages of Centralized Database System

1. If the network is slow, the accessibility of required because all data is stored in
one place. Since all the data is at one location. The searching process takes much
time.
2. If centralized server failure due to some reasons all database will be a loss.
3. All data is stored in one place when many users access data at the same time it
may create many problems.
4. When the many record same place will be accessed at the same time the
collision will be accord in the result of collision may be precious data will be lost.

Q3. Assuming that management decides on a distributed database, what data

distribution strategy would you recommend?

Replication is useful in improving the availability of data. The most extreme case is
replication of the whole database at every site in the distributed system, thus creating a
fully replicated distributed database. This can improve availability remarkably because
the system can continue to operate as long as at least one site is up. It also improves
performance of retrieval for global queries because the results of such queries can be
obtained locally from any one site; hence, a retrieval query can be processed at the
local site where it is submitted, if that site includes a server module. The disadvantage
of full replication is that it can slow down update operations drastically, since a single
logical update must be performed on every copy of the database to keep the copies
consistent. This is especially true if many copies of the database exist. Full replication
makes the concurrency control and recovery techniques more expensive than they
would be if there was no replication. The other extreme from full replication involves
having no replication—that is, each fragment is stored at exactly one site. In this case,
all fragments must be disjoint, except for the repetition of primary keys among vertical
(or mixed) fragments. This is also called non redundant allocation.
 
Between these two extremes, we have a wide spectrum of partial replication of the data
—that is, some fragments of the database may be replicated whereas others may not.
The number of copies of each fragment can range from one up to the total number of
sites in the distributed system. A special case of partial replication is occurring heavily in
applications where mobile workers—such as sales forces, financial planners, and
claims adjustors—carry partially replicated databases with them on laptops and PDAs
and synchronize them periodically with the server database. 7 A description of the
replication of fragments is sometimes called a replication schema.
 
Each fragment—or each copy of a fragment—must be assigned to a particular site in
the distributed system. This process is called data distribution (or data allocation). The
choice of sites and the degree of replication depend on the performance and availability
goals of the system and on the types and frequencies of transactions submitted at each
site. For example, if high availability is required, transactions can be submitted at any
site, and most transactions are retrieval only, a fully replicated database is a good
choice. However, if certain transactions that access particular parts of the database are
mostly submitted at a particular site, the corresponding set of fragments can be
allocated at that site only. Data that is accessed at multiple sites can be replicated at
those sites. If many updates are performed, it may be useful to limit replication. Finding
an optimal or even a good solution to distributed data allocation is a complex
optimization problem.