IRO-DB - A Distributed System Federating Object and Relational Databases

Abstract

this paper adopts the federated approach to database interoperability [SL90] to overcome these limitations. Unlike homogeneous distributed database management systems, a federated database management system adds layers of software to pre-existing heterogeneous database management systems without privileging one system. These layers provide for syntactically uniform export schemas and data manipulation languages and also for semantically integrated schemas with global transaction management and concurrency control over multiple sites. Most importantly, this approach does not violate the autonomy of the pre-existing databases; that is, database providers participating in a federation do not lose control over their data and ideally do not have to re-engineer their DBMSs and applications to allow interoperability with other DBMSs. Several federated database systems have already been prototyped [TTC