A New Approach To Secure Federated Information Bases Using Agent Technology

Database agents, in our context also called DBagents, can be utilized to establish a federated information base by integrating heterogeneous databases. Agents are especially well suited to also address the highly relevant issue of security. During the process of migration, DBagents are wrapped into Java agents that provide various mechanisms for security and migration. This special architecture can be used to perform schema updates on distributed databases as well as to extract information in order to create and refresh data warehouses. Moreover, queries that require data which is too detailed for data warehouses can be answered by propagating them from the data warehouse to the underlying operational databases wrapped in DBagents. Furthermore, a federation connected by DBagents is much more flexible; new databases may join or existing ones may leave the federation even while queries are executed.