Using Materialized Views to Enhance a Traceable P2P Record Exchange Framework

P2P technologies are drawing increasing attention nowadays, and have been widely deployed on the Internet for various purposes. Unlike the traditional client-server architecture, a P2P network allows all computers to communicate and share resources as equals and does not depend on a central server for control. In such an environment, tracing how data is copied between peers and how data modifications are performed are not easy because data replications and modifications are performed independently by autonomous peers. This creates inconsistencies in exchanged information and results in a lack of trustworthiness. To provide reliable and flexible information exchange facility in P2P networks, we have proposed a framework for enabling traceable record exchange. In this framework, a computer can exchange structured records with a predefined schema with other peers. The framework supports a tracing facility to query the lineage of the records obtained. A tracing query is described in Datalog and executed as a recursive query among cooperating peers in a P2P network. In the query execution process, the exchange and modification histories of the queried records are collected dynamically from relevant peers. In this paper, we focus on how to enhance the traceable P2P record exchange framework using materialized views. First, we discuss how to construct materialized views in our framework. Then we present methods for reducing query processing cost and providing fault tolerance using the materialized views.