Distributed Rule Monitoring in Active Databases

Abstract

Production rules provide a unifying mechanism for several traditional features in database management systems and for new functionalities sought after by potential database applications. With integrated production rules, a database is transformed from traditionally passive to active such that the database will take predefined actions without user intervention when the database transits into certain states. Processing every rule upon every update in the system places a tremendous performance requirement on the success of active databases. The availability of multiple sites in a distributed database offers an opportunity to process rules in parallel. In addition, the features offered by production rules are desirable to distributed databases as well. The problem of monitoring rules in a distributed active database is investigated in this article to successfully integrate rules into distributed databases.