Using Traders for Loosely Integrating Heterogeneous Database Systems

Abstract

This paper presents the design and prototype implementation of a loosely integrated heterogeneous database system. The main goal of the design is to let local databases maintain full autonomy over their databases, yet when willing, they can share some portion of their information. These local databases register with a trader the portion of information that can be shared by using service offers. A service offer can be in the form of data, operations on data, or both. A trading agents is appointed by database systems to managing the services to be provided. The trading agent will be involved in special functions such as schema translation and shared data and/or operations on multiple database systems. The propotype implementation of the loosely integrated heterogeneous database system (involving two different database systems) is now running on a network of Sun workstations.