Developing a decision support system for designing distributed databases on a local area network

This paper proposes a design methodology for distributed databases connected by a LAN. Two primary objectives of the methodology are (i) to allocate data files and workload among heterogeneous servers and (ii) to determine the number of servers to satisfy the response time required for processing each transaction. The file and workload allocation decision is formulated as a nonlinear zero-one integer programming problem. This problem is proven to be NP-complete. A heuristic is developed to solve this problem effectively. A decision support system is implemented and an example is solved to illustrate the practical usefulness of the system.