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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Robert Stroud
Data persistence is an important requirement from many application areas, such as fault-tolerant systems, multimedia applications and object-oriented databases. However, the interface provided by the conventional operating systems is often inappropriate for supporting persistence and it may not provide enough control over the hardware support for memory management. Therefore, persistent systems built above a conventional operating systems can hardly be efficient and scalable. An alternative approach is to develop a new operating system with an interface specially oriented towards supporting data persistence. The aim of this approach is to remove the impedance mismatch between the requirements of persistent systems and the facilities provided by the operating systems. However, because persistent systems need to meet ever-increasing user demands and expectations, it is impossible for a persistent system to match all the demands from different application areas, no matter how clever the system is. In this paper, we suggest a new approach to persistent system design which opens the systems up by using the reflection and object-oriented programming techniques. Instead of trying to match all the requirement from applications, we provide interfaces to persistent systems that give users the ability to incrementally modify the behaviour of implementations of systems. In such a way, users can get the persistent system matching their requirements by customising the basic system.
Author(s): Stroud RJ, Wu Z
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 1995
Pages: 5
Print publication date: 01/01/1995
Source Publication Date: 1995
Report Number: 513
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/513.pdf
