Providing database as a service

TLDR

DBaaS reduces hardware and software costs, offloads maintenance, frees organizations to focus on core activities, but introduces challenges such as remote access overhead, privacy, and UI design. The paper investigates the DBaaS paradigm, focusing on data privacy and proposing encryption solutions, and challenges the database community to explore related research issues. The authors develop a third‑party hosted service, NetDB2, that lets customers create, store, and access databases remotely, and propose encryption‑based privacy safeguards. NetDB2 has been deployed on the Internet and is in continuous use.

Abstract

We explore a novel paradigm for data management in which a third party service provider hosts "database as a service", providing its customers with seamless mechanisms to create, store, and access their databases at the host site. Such a model alleviates the need for organizations to purchase expensive hardware and software, deal with software upgrades, and hire professionals for administrative and maintenance tasks which are taken over by the service provider. We have developed and deployed a database service on the Internet, called NetDB2, which is in constant use. In a sense, a data management model supported by NetDB2 provides an effective mechanism for organizations to purchase data management as a service, thereby freeing them to concentrate on their core businesses. Among the primary challenges introduced by "database as a service" are the additional overhead of remote access to data, an infrastructure to guarantee data privacy, and user interface design for such a service. These issues are investigated. We identify data privacy as a particularly vital problem and propose alternative solutions based on data encryption. The paper is meant as a challenge for the database community to explore a rich set of research issues that arise in developing such a service.