Data replication in distributed environments

Distributed system model best suits on the organizational structure of companies that, because of their business needs, are geographically distributed. For the organizations that are expanding globally, the data exchange between multiple databases and applications has become more important. In distributed environments we are facing new problems that are not relevant in centralized environments, such as data fragmentation and replication. Designing a distributed database system also involves the decisions about placing the information on different sites in a computer network. The problem of data fragments allocation on different sites is closely related to data replication in distributed databases. In this paper we will concentrate on data allocation problem, revealing the data allocation importance in the process of the distributed database design in correlation with data fragmentation. In addition, we will analyze the available strategies and methods of data allocation.