Communications issues in data engineering: 'have bandwidth-will move data'

It is argued that those areas of data engineering research which are based on the assumption that communication bandwidth is a constraint, should be investigated. Some additional distributed database issues that require reinvestigation include concurrency control, network partitioning, backup storage and recovery algorithms. With the availability of increased bandwidth, global flooding of information can result in lower processing times than conventional approaches. Hence, broadcast-based solutions which continuously inform the various sites of the system status and data modifications need to be reconsidered. Novel transmission rates also invalidate old assumptions.<>