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

Improving Integrity Constraints Checking In Distributed Databases by Exploiting Local Checking

Integrity constraints are important tools and useful for specifying consistent states of a database. Checking integrity constraints has proven to be extremely difficult to implement, particularly in distributed database. The main issue concerning checking the integrity constraints in distributed database system is how to derive a set of integrity tests (simplified forms) that will reduce the amount of data transferred, the amount of data accessed, and the number of sites involved during the constraint checking process. Most of the previous approaches derive integrity tests (simplified forms) from the initial integrity constraints with the sufficiency property, since the sufficient test is known to be cheaper to execute than the complete test as it involved less data to be transferred across the network and always can be evaluated at the target site, i.e. only one site is involved during the checking process thus, achieving local checking. The previous approaches assume that an update operation will be executed at a site where the relation specified in the update operation is located (target site), which is not always true. If the update operation is submitted at a different site, the sufficient test is no longer local as it will definitely access data from the remote sites. Therefore, an approach is needed so that local checking can be performed regardless the location of the submitted update operation. In this thesis we proposed an approach for checking integrity constraints in a distributed database system by utilizing as much as possible the information stored at the target site. The proposed constraints simplification approach produces support tests and this is integrated with complete and sufficient tests which are proposed by previous researchers. It uses the initial integrity constraint, the update template, and the other integrity constraints to generate the support tests. The proposed constraints simplification approach adopted the substitution technique and the absorption rules to derive the tests. Since the constraint simplification approach derives several different types of integrity tests for a given update operation and integrity constraint, therefore a strategy to select the most suitable test is needed. We proposed a model to rank and select the suitable test to be checked based on the properties of the tests, the amount of data transferred across the network, the number of sites participated, and the amount of data accessed. Three analyses have been performed to evaluate the proposed checking integrity constraints approach. The first analysis shows that applying different types of integrity tests gives different impacts to the performance of the constraint checking, with respect to the amount of data transferred across the network which is considered as the most critical factor that influences the performance of the checking mechanism. Integrating these various types of integrity tests during constraint checking has enhanced the performance of the constraint mechanisms. The second analysis shows that the cost of checking integrity constraints is reduced when various combinations of integrity tests are selected. The third analysis shows that in most cases localizing integrity checking can be achieved regardless of the location where the update operation is executed when various types of integrity tests are considered

Cost and Performance Analysis of Integrity Validation Techniques for a Distributed Database

A principal problem with the use of integrity constraints for monitoring the integrity of a dynamically changing database is their cost of evaluation. This cost which is associated with the performance of the checking mechanisms is the main quantitative measure which has to be supervised carefully. We have developed an integrity constraint subsystem for a relational distributed database (SICSDD) which consists of several techniques that are necessary for efficient constraint checking, particularly in a distributed environment where data distribution is transparent to the application domain. In this paper, we will show how these techniques have effectively reduced the cost of constraint checking in such a distributed environment

Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS), submitted 19th March 200

Intelligent Application of Partial Repair for Handling Inconsistency among Database

Handling inconsistencies among standalone and integrated databases has been an important issue for database’s administrators for decades where nowadays databases are huge and not only different types of inconsistencies are ubiquitous in them but also application of any repair might induce new violations to integrity constraints. Resolved data may harm rest of database that leads to a costly process for repair of inconsistent data while after any resolution of data, database should be checked whether any new violation has emerged or not. Introducing partial repair through an approach to measure the tendency that a resolved portion of data incurs new violation would help any repair algorithm to isolate a selection of problematic data (not all), resolve it and save the database from being hurt during repair process. Partial repair keeps the rest of data from being affected that eliminates concerns over application of repair. Partial repair may not handle entire inconsistencies among databases but it represents a repair that would have minimum harm to rest of data along with consideration of cost which makes it valuable. Keywords: data quality, repair, inconsistency, dependenc