DBMS Transactions for handheld Devices

Handheld devices are very popular today. They are used for personal and enterprise applications like Health-care and Micro-banking. These are complex applications and require effective management of data. Applications have to query and also update remote databases.

Updates typically involve transactions. Transactions have to maintain the ACID properties at local as well as global level. Transaction management has to capture the movement behavior, frequent disconnections and small communication bandwidth characteristics of handheld. Data may be downloaded from remote server and processed offline on the handheld. Several handhelds may download the same data from a remote server and maintain a local copy.

Periodic synchronization of the local copies with the data in the remote server is required and some sort of the data consistency must be maintained between the various copies. A lightweight database is required on the handheld to meet the above requirements.

In this report we explore techniques that can provide effective transaction management and synchronization.