A federated architecture for information management

Abstract

An approach to the coordinated sharing and interchange of computerized information is described emphasizing partial, controlled sharing among autonomous databases. Office information systems provide a particularly appropriate context for this type of information sharing and exchange. A federated database architecture is described in which a collection of independent database systems are united into a loosely coupled federation in order to share and exchange information. A federation consists of components (of which there may be any number) and a single federal dictionary. The components represent individual users, applications, workstations, or other components in an office information system. The federal dictionary is a specialized component that maintains the topology of the federation and oversees the entry of new components. Each component in the federation controls its interactions with other components by means of an export schema and an import schema. The export schema specifies the information that a component will share with other components, while the import schema specifies the nonlocal information that a component wishes to manipulate. The federated architecture provides mechanisms for sharing data, for sharing transactions (via message types) for combining information from several components, and for coordinating activities among autonomous components (via negotiation). A prototype implementation of the federated database mechanism is currently operational on an experimental basis.

Autoplex: Automated Discovery of Content for Virtual Databases

“…The integration of information from multiple databases has been an enduring subject of research for over twenty years (for example, [16,7,10,5,21,27,26,2,11]). Indeed, while the solutions that have been advanced tended to reflect the research approaches prevailing at their time, the overall goal has remained mostly unchanged: to provide flexible and efficient access to information residing in a collection of distributed, heterogeneous and overlapping databases (more generally, other kinds of information sources may be considered as well).…”

A Unified View of Data-Intensive Flows in Business Intelligence Systems: A Survey

“…We focused on the fields of data exchange, data integration, as well as ETL, and ETO. The need for managing heterogeneous data has appeared ever since the database systems start being more broadly used (e.g., federated databases in the 80's [43]). Besides, even though the system in [82] from the 70's is argued to be the first approach that followed the principles of data exchange, the data exchange problem has not been formally defined until the early 00's [26].…”

Federated Stream Processing Support for Real-Time Business Intelligence Applications

“…As such, it closely relates to the work on traditional database federation. In federated databases, middleware (typically an extension of a relational database management system) provides uniform access to a number of heterogeneous data sources (e.g., [7,8,9]). Similarly, we have built MaxStream as a middle layer between clients and underlying systems, extending a relational engine infrastructure.…”