dLIMIT - A Middleware Framework for Loosely-Coupled Database Federations

Today, the Internet offers an everyday increasing number of information sources making search for a certain piece of information a difficult job. By combining existing special-purpose information sources, larger data volumes can be offered to users increasing the chance of finding the needed information. In this paper, we present dLIMIT, a flexible, application-independent framework for building adaptive middleware to easily combine multiple similarly structured databases (DBs). For accessing the related database management systems (DBMSs) residing on heterogeneous platforms different protocols can be used. The dLIMIT-based middleware can be easily configured to requirements of both the application and the DBMSs.