What Can Database Do for Peer-to-Peer?

The Internet community has recently been focused on peer-to-peer systems like Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet. The grand vision — a decentralized community of machines pooling their resources to benefit everyone — is compelling for many reasons: scalability, robustness, lack of need for administration, and even anonymity and resistance to censorship. Existing peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have focused on specific application domains (e.g. music files) or on providing filesystem-like capabilities; these systems ignore the semantics of data. An important question for the database community is how data management can be applied to P2P, and what we can learn from and contribute to the P2P area. We address these questions, identify a number of potential research ideas in the overlap between data management and P2P systems, present some preliminary fundamental results, and describe our initial work in constructing a P2P data management system.