Active Database Management of Global Data Integrity Constraints in Heterogeneous Database Environments

Today, enterprises maintain many, disparate information sources over which complex business procedures and applications are executed. The informal and ad hoc characteristics of these environments make the information in them very prone to inconsistency. Yet, the exibility of application execution given to diierent parts of an organization is desirable. This paper introduces a new mechanism in which the execution of asynchronous, pre-existing, yet related, applications can be harnessed. A multidatabase framework that supports the concurrent execution of these applications with heterogeneous, distributed transactions is presented. Using this framework, we introduce an intuitive conceptual model and algorithm for the enforcement of interdatabase constraints and outline an implementation based on active database technology.