Document Exchange Considered Useful – Extending the Reach of DBMS-Functionality to Document Driven Processes

VLDB 2006 Ph.D. Workshop

Alexander Hilliger von Thile

Others  :  http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-170/paper9.pdf
PID  :  11855

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

In today's enterprises documents are preferred by most users for data exchange in spontaneously started and frequently changing processes because documents (e.g. spreadsheets) are easy to create and to edit. This causes well known problems such as poor data quality due to missing constraint checks, no up-to-date data in backend systems (e.g. for analysis), and missing multi-user support. These problems could be avoided by using special applications that store their data in a DBMS. But for end users this is significantly more complex and expensive than just creating a new spreadsheet.Instead of refraining from document exchange this paper describes how the reach of well-known database concepts (e.g. multi-user support, data quality checks, and trigger) can be extended to support document-driven data exchange.To this end, this paper presents a novel approach to handle data inside common documents as objects that are under control by a DBMS. This is realized by extending the concept of common views to materialized external views. Afterwards, this paper describes how documents can be turned into a DBMS themselves by combining data, meta-data, and execution logic within a single file. These 'smart' files can be exchanged like other documents but they are able to check their data for integrity and propagate changes to backend systems automatically.