Integrity Constraint Checking in Federated Databases

A federated database is comprised of multiple interconnected databases that cooperate in an autonomous fashion. Global integrity constraints are very useful in federated databases, but the lack of global queries, global transaction mechanisms, and global concurrency control renders traditional constraint management techniques inapplicable. The paper presents a threefold contribution to integrity constraint checking in federated databases: (1) the problem of constraint checking in a federated database environment is clearly formulated; (2) a family of cooperative protocols for constraint checking is presented; (3) the differences across protocols in the family are analyzed with respect to system requirements, properties guaranteed, and costs involved. Thus, we provide a suite of options with protocols for various environments with specific system capabilities and integrity requirement

Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Protocols for Integrity Constraint Checking in Federated Databases

A federated database is comprised of multiple interconnected database systems that primarily operate independently but cooperate to a certain extent. Global integrity constraints can be very useful in federated databases, but the lack of global queries, global transaction mechanisms, and global concurrency control renders traditional constraint management techniques inapplicable. This paper presents a threefold contribution to integrity constraint checking in federated databases: (1) The problem of constraint checking in a federated database environment is clearly formulated. (2) A family of protocols for constraint checking is presented. (3) The differences across protocols in the family are analyzed with respect to system requirements, properties guaranteed by the protocols, and processing and communication costs. Thus, our work yields a suite of options from which a protocol can be chosen to suit the system capabilities and integrity requirements of a particular federated database environment

A Java implementation of Coordination Rules as ECA Rules

This paper gives an insight in to the design and implementation of the coordination rules as ECA rules. The language specifications of the ECA rules were designed and the corresponding implementation of the same using JAVA as been partially done. The paper also hints about the future work in this area which deals with embedding this code in JXTA, thus enabling to form a P2P layer with JXTA as the back bone

Middleware-based Database Replication: The Gaps between Theory and Practice

The need for high availability and performance in data management systems has been fueling a long running interest in database replication from both academia and industry. However, academic groups often attack replication problems in isolation, overlooking the need for completeness in their solutions, while commercial teams take a holistic approach that often misses opportunities for fundamental innovation. This has created over time a gap between academic research and industrial practice. This paper aims to characterize the gap along three axes: performance, availability, and administration. We build on our own experience developing and deploying replication systems in commercial and academic settings, as well as on a large body of prior related work. We sift through representative examples from the last decade of open-source, academic, and commercial database replication systems and combine this material with case studies from real systems deployed at Fortune 500 customers. We propose two agendas, one for academic research and one for industrial R&D, which we believe can bridge the gap within 5-10 years. This way, we hope to both motivate and help researchers in making the theory and practice of middleware-based database replication more relevant to each other.Comment: 14 pages. Appears in Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Vancouver, Canada, June 200

A Review of integrity constraint maintenance and view updating techniques

Two interrelated problems may arise when updating a database. On one hand, when an update is applied to the database, integrity constraints may become violated. In such case, the integrity constraint maintenance approach tries to obtain additional updates to keep integrity constraints satisfied. On the other hand, when updates of derived or view facts are requested, a view updating mechanism must be applied to translate the update request into correct updates of the underlying base facts. This survey reviews the research performed on integrity constraint maintenance and view updating. It is proposed a general framework to classify and to compare methods that tackle integrity constraint maintenance and/or view updating. Then, we analyze some of these methods in more detail to identify their actual contribution and the main limitations they may present.Postprint (published version

A Survey of Languages for Specifying Dynamics: A Knowledge Engineering Perspective

A number of formal specification languages for knowledge-based systems has been developed. Characteristics for knowledge-based systems are a complex knowledge base and an inference engine which uses this knowledge to solve a given problem. Specification languages for knowledge-based systems have to cover both aspects. They have to provide the means to specify a complex and large amount of knowledge and they have to provide the means to specify the dynamic reasoning behavior of a knowledge-based system. We focus on the second aspect. For this purpose, we survey existing approaches for specifying dynamic behavior in related areas of research. In fact, we have taken approaches for the specification of information systems (Language for Conceptual Modeling and TROLL), approaches for the specification of database updates and logic programming (Transaction Logic and Dynamic Database Logic) and the generic specification framework of abstract state machine

ElasTraS: An Elastic Transactional Data Store in the Cloud

Over the last couple of years, "Cloud Computing" or "Elastic Computing" has emerged as a compelling and successful paradigm for internet scale computing. One of the major contributing factors to this success is the elasticity of resources. In spite of the elasticity provided by the infrastructure and the scalable design of the applications, the elephant (or the underlying database), which drives most of these web-based applications, is not very elastic and scalable, and hence limits scalability. In this paper, we propose ElasTraS which addresses this issue of scalability and elasticity of the data store in a cloud computing environment to leverage from the elastic nature of the underlying infrastructure, while providing scalable transactional data access. This paper aims at providing the design of a system in progress, highlighting the major design choices, analyzing the different guarantees provided by the system, and identifying several important challenges for the research community striving for computing in the cloud.Comment: 5 Pages, In Proc. of USENIX HotCloud 200