| With the increased confidence in, and the use of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the number of electronic commerce (e-commerce) transactions is growing rapidly. To increase throughput and reduce response time for e-commerce transaction requests, parallel processing techniques can be used. The parallel processing techniques addressed in this thesis focus on parallelizing on-line transaction processing (OLTP).;The aims of this thesis are to: (1) characterize e-commerce transactions with a view to find those aspects that would benefit from parallel processing; (2) evaluate current parallel processing techniques to determine those techniques that can be applied to e-commerce transactions; and (3) provide a reliable, flexible, and scalable design of an e-commerce transaction processing system that uses parallel processing techniques to deal with data intensive transactions and to process those transactions faster.;My contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, I addressed the opportunities that could apply parallel processing techniques in the business logic tier and the database tier in multi-tier e-commerce systems. Second, I developed several generic parallel algorithms for e-commerce systems. Third, I implemented a prototype e-commerce transaction processing system that used those parallel processing techniques. |
