Supporting Local Autonomy in a Distributed Object-Oriented Database

Local autonomy of the individual databases in a distributed system is important as administrators of the individual databases often need to have complete control over how their data are structured, used and managed. Classical distributed databases support distribution transparency, replication transparency and fragmentation transparency. Researchers have recognized that transparent access to databases in a distributed system is inherently incompatible with the notions of local autonomy. In this thesis we propose a new model of distributed object-oriented databases that supports local autonomy of the individual databases. Local autonomy is achieved by allowing the database administrators of the individual databases to adapt a globally available schema to fit their local needs, but still be able to share data with others in the distributed system. Central to this model is a new concept called federated collections, which are collections of objects of the same class that may be distributed across a number of databases in one or more sites. The schema of a federated collection (FC) is available globally in the form of the version trees of the classes that constitute the schema. The schema of an FC includes the class of the member objects (member class) of the FC, and transitively all the classes used directly or indirectly in the definition of the member class. The administrator of each database that participates in a federated collection may create a new version of a globally available class and adopt it for the local component of a federated collection. Class version mapping and federated queries support seamless querying of federated collections.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Kalathil, Biju Joseph

Contributors dc:contributor

• Belford, Geneva G.

• Computer Science

Identifier

(UMI)AAI9503225

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/72100