A Case for Deltas in Business - to - BusinessElectronic

At the time of this writing, the electronic commerce market place is dominated by business-to-business transactions. This paper describes one such application and our software prototype in support of this application. Our main contribution is a software solutions (using Java) that employs the concept of deltas to maintain consistency in a replicated, distributed environment. Our proposed solution strives to be independent of the schema of the business objects in order to enhance its portability across diierent applications. 1 Introduction With the reduced cost of computer hardware and the growing popularity of the Internet, many small to midsize companies are utilizing database management systems in support of business-to-business electronic commerce. The typical characteristics of this environment are as follows: Multiple ooce locations must have a uniied view of information, and a high-speed reliable network connection between ooces is not always an option. A good example is an insurance company that ooers rental car customers liability coverage for accidents. In this environment, the rental car representative acts as an agent of the insurance company to sell the customer a peace of mind. Periodically, the rental car company reports to the insurance company the sold liability policies. The traditional way of conducting business using paper does not work because it has opened the door for fraud. To illustrate, consider a customer who rents a car and buys liability insurance. Upon returning the car without damage, a rental car company may destroy insurance documents in order to increase its proots (without payment to the insurance company). Similarly, the rental car company may nd it more economical to sell a customer insurance after the occurrence of an accident, even though the customer did not buy insurance at the time of rental. In both cases, the insurance company loses money. In this scenario, fraud is prevented if the sales of insurance policies is time stamped and registered in a database management system at the insurance company. However, many rental car ooces do not generate enough business for the insurance company to justify installing and maintaining dedicated network connection at each rental car ooce. The business would beneet from electronic commerce and has the following requirements: