This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, ICSOC 2006, held in Chicago, IL, USA in December 2006.

The 34 revised full papers and 16 short papers presented together with 12 industrial and demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from over 200 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on service mediation, grid services and scheduling, mobile and P2P services, service composition, adaptive services, data intensive services, service management: registry, reliability, XML processing, service modeling, business services: transaction, licensing, and SLA assessment, service discovery and selection, quality of service (policy, transaction and monitoring), business service modeling, service assembly, vision papers, experience with deployed SOA, SOA architectures, early adoption of SOA technology.

Large transaction-processing applications, such as banking, flight reservations, telecommunications, and networking, demand increasingly high throughput and fast response times. Coupling multiple systems for database transaction processing can provide these systems with higher capacity and availability at a lower cost. Data sharing is one promising architecture for such an environment.This monograph develops a comprehensive model for analyzing the design and performance of a complex data-sharing environment that consists of multiple, loosely coupled transaction-processing nodes with a common database at the disk level. By capturing the salient features of this data sharing architecture database buffers at each node with their buffer management policies, concurrency control, buffer coherency, nonuniform database access, and CPU queueing delay - the model can be used to answer a number of design questions about scalability, buffer utilization, skewed access, policy selection, and optimal system configuration. Included are two new submodels, for private and shared buffers.Asit Dan is a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.