Sharing musical files via the Internet was the essential motivation of early P2P systems. Despite of the great success of the P2P file sharing systems, these systems support only "simple" queries. The focus in such systems is how to carry out an efficient query routing in order to find the nodes storing a desired file. Recently, several research works have been made to extend P2P systems to be able to share data having a fine granularity (i.e. atomic attribute) and to process queries written with a highly expressive language (i.e. SQL). These works have led to the emergence of P2P data sharing systems that represent a new generation of P2P systems and, on the other hand, a next stage in a long period of the database research area. The characteristics of P2P systems (e.g. large-scale, node autonomy and instability) make impractical to have a global catalog that represents often an essential component in traditional database systems. Usually, such a catalog stores information about data, schemas and data sources. Query routing and processing are two problems affected by the absence of a global catalog. Locating relevant data sources and generating a close to optimal execution plan become more difficult. In this paper, we concentrate our study on proposed solutions for the both problems. Furthermore, selected case studies of main P2P data sharing systems are analyzed and compared.
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