Applications of Heraclitus in Telecommunications Information Processing

In many telecommunications information processing applications it is useful, and often necessary, to create and access multiple hypothetical states. These might correspond to future states re ecting pending updates, or hypothetical alternative states that arise in the exploration of possible solutions. This paper shows how the Heraclitus family of database programming languages can be applied to satisfy such requirements. In the Heraclitus paradigm, database updates are captured as deltas, which are syntactic objects that can be e ciently manipulated. Deltas can be used to represent pending or hypothetical updates. We also consider the issue of incorporating Heraclitus functionalities into legacy telecommunication database systems. This research was supported in part by NSF grant IRI-931832; ARPA grants BAA-92-1092 and 33825-RT-AAS; and a sponsored research agreement from U S WEST Advanced Technologies.