Administration and Autonomy in a Replication-Transparent Distributed DBMS

Administrative issues are of vital importance to organizations adopting distributed database technology. Most research systems and emerging commercial DDBMSs have assumed site autonomy as a guiding principle. This paper presents some general problems associated with autonomy and administration in a DDBMS, and discusses the incompatibility between replication transparency and site autonomy. In a DDBMS which supports replication transparency, the degree of site autonomy in a system should properly be a policy decision made by system administrators. Parameterization of the degree of site autonomy in a DDBMS involves careful design of a mechanism involving storage structures, operations, and authorization. A mechanism which extends the ANSI SQL authorization model is described, and examples of how users can use the mechanism to implement both centralized and decentralized administration policies are presented.