An economic paradigm for query processing and data migration in mariposa

Many new database applications require very large volumes of data. Mariposa is a data base system under construction at Berkley responding to this need. Mariposa objects can be stored over thousands of autonomous sites and on memory hierarchies with very large capacity. This scale of the system leads to complex query execution and storage management issues, unsolvable in practice with traditional techniques. We propose an economic paradigm as the solution. A query receives a budget which it spends to obtain the answers. Each site attempts to maximize income by buying and selling storage objects, and processing queries for locally stored objects. We present the protocols which underlie the Mariposa economy.