A meta model and an infrastructure for the non-transparent replication of object databases

Abstract

distribution of data within or between organizations is crucial for many applications. Such a distribution may be transparent, as it is embodied in distributed database systems to increase their performance, reliability and availability. Other systems either do not require transparent data distribution or even explicitly need their own copies of the data. Examples are data warehouses which collect base data from different transac- tion processing systems, or financial data distribution systems in banking where data are bought from external providers and distributed to different working groups. Such systems need non-transparent, partial and selective replication of databases. If object databases are used, appropriate replication systems have to cope with the additional complexity of object models. TodayOs replication systems do not meet these requirements. Consequently, we introduce a meta model that specifies the ab- stract functionality which is needed for the non-transparent, partial and selective replication of object databases. This meta model allows incorporation of its replication concepts in a va- riety of object models. In addition, we present the design of a replication infrastructure, based on the meta model, which serves as the foundation for concrete realizations of object replication systems. The development of a replication system for a time series database management system proved the viabil- ity of the proposed solution.