Towards Interoperability in Heterogeneous Database Systems

Distributed heterogeneous databases consist of systems which differ physically and logically, containing different data models and data manipulation languages. Although these databases are independently created and administered they must cooperate and interoperate. Users need to access and manipulate data from several databases and applications may require data from a wide variety of independent databases. Therefore, a new system architecture is required to manipulate and manage distinct and multiple databases, in a transparent way, while preserving their autonomy. This report contains an extensive survey on heterogeneous databases, analysing and comparing the different aspects, concepts and approaches related to the topic. It introduces an architecture to support interoperability among heterogeneous database systems. The architecture avoids the use of a centralised structure to assist in the different phases of the interoperability process. It aims to support scalability, and to assure privacy and confidentiality of the data. The proposed architecture allows the databases to decide when to participate in the system, what type of data to share and with which other databases, thereby preserving their autonomy. The report also describes an approach to information discovery in the proposed architecture, without using any centralised structure as repositories and dictionaries, and broadcasting to all databases. It attempts to reduce the number of databases searched and to preserve the privacy of the shared data. The main idea is to visit a database that either contains the requested data or knows about another database that possible contains this data.