Issues of Global Version Management in Federated Database Systems for Engineering Environments

Today, the di erent phases of a product engineering life-cycle (tendering, development, produc-tion, commissioning, maintenance, etc.) are supported by several computer applications. But nowadays each of these often \home grown " tools has its own way of storing data in les or databases and its own way of managing di erent versions of the data. This results in inconsisten

Issues of Global Version Management in Federated Database Systems for Engineering Environments (Extended Abstract)

1 Introduction and Motivation Today, the different phases of a product engineering life-cycle (tendering, development, production, commissioning, maintenance, etc.) are supported by several computer applications. But nowadays each of these often "home grown" tools has its own way of storing data in files or databases and its own way of managing different versions of the data. This results in inconsistent and redundant data. In engineering design, (manual) versioning has a long tradition (think about drawing numbers and drawing version control). Although using computers, version management is nowadays still done manually by the designer by moving and copying files. In this case no logging and no control of the versioned data is available and, quite often, data gets lost. This may lead to serious quality and quality management problems. To solve these problems, heterogeneous engineering applications can be integrated into a federated database management system (FDBMS), leading to a cent..