1986 Reports

Superdatabases for Composition of Heterogeneous Databases

Pu, Calton

Superdatabases are designed to compose and extend databases. In particular, superdatabases allow consistent update across heterogeneous databases. The key idea of superdatabase is hierarchical composition of element databases. For global crash recovery, each element database must provide local recovery plus some kind of agreement protocol, such as two-phase commit. For global concurrency control, each element database must have local synchronization with an explicit serial order, such as two-phase locking, timestamps, or optimistic methods. Given element databases satisfying the above requirements, the superdatabase can certify the serializability of global transactions through a concatenation of local serial order. Combined with previous work on heterogeneous databases, including unified query languages and view integration, now we can build heterogeneous databases which are consistent, adaptable, and extensible by construction.