ECA Rule Support for Distributed Heterogeneous Environments

The utility and functionality of active capability (EventCondition-Action or ECA rules) has been well established in the context of databases. Today, most of the commercial relational database management systems (RDBMSs) offer some form of ECA rule capability. In addition, there are several research prototypes that have extended the ECA rule capability to object-oriented database management systems (OODBMSs). Sentinel, developed at the University of Florida ([1], [2]) is one such prototype that supports an expressive composite event specification language (Snoop), efficient event detection (using generated wrappers), conditions and actions (as a combination of OQL and C++), multiple and cascaded rule processing (using a rule scheduler and nested transactions), a visualization tool, and an editor for dynamic creation and management of rules.