Hans-J
Schek, Klemens Böhm, Torsten Grabs,
Uwe Röhm, Heiko Schuldt, Roger Weber
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Zurich, Switzerland
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ABSTRACT |
Hyperdatabases
When modern database systems have been introduced twenty years ago they have been considered as infrastructure and main platform for application development. Today, considering the management of software components and application services, distributed client/middleware/server computing, application frameworks, enterprise resource planning systems, XML, and e-commerce, the database system is a storage manager, far away from the applications. Hyperdatabases are thought to move up database technology to a higher level, closer to the applications. Distributed objects and software components as well as workflows are managed by a hyperdatabase system in a similar manner as a database system manages data. In short, hyperdatabases, also called “higher order databases”, will provide the infrastructure for distributed information systems engineering of the future.
In a first part, the talk will elaborate on this vision. A second part is devoted to concrete projects at ETHZ such as PowerDB, a DB cluster project and show how an efficient document engine can be built.on top of a DB cluster. A further project is devoted to transactional process management as a layer on top of database transactions. Image similarity and multimedia components is another project where we show how we coordinate specialized components such as feature extraction and indexing services in a worldwide distributed information environment
