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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Paul WatsonORCiD
This paper examines how databases can be integrated into the Grid. At the time of writing, most existing and proposed Grid applications are file-based. Consequently, there has been little work on how databases can be made available on the Grid for access by distributed applications. Therefore, this paper investigates the requirements of Grid-enabled databases and considers how these requirements are met by existing Grid middleware. This shows that support is currently very limited, and so the paper goes on to propose a service-based architecture to meet the requirements. In this architecture, database systems are wrapped within a Grid-enabled service interface that simplifies the task of building applications to access their contents. The ability to federate data from multiple databases is likely to be a very powerful facility for Grid users wishing to collate and analyse information distributed over the Grid. The paper proposes a framework for federating database servers over the Grid, in which service federation middleware connects to the service interfaces of the set of database systems to be federated, and creates a ôVirtual database systemö. This presents the same service interface to applications as do the individual, un-federated, database systems, so avoiding the need for applications to interface directly to a set of database systems and implement the federation functionality within the application. While the paper focuses on federating database systems, it also argues that the service-based approach will simplify the task of integrating databases with file-based data on the Grid, where that is required.
Author(s): Watson P
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2002
Pages: 16
Report Number: 755
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/755.pdf
