Updatability in federated database systems

Abstract

It is important to support updates in federated database systems. However, not all updates on the federated schema are possible because some may violate certain constraints in the local databases which are involved in the federation. In this paper, we give a formal framework which characterizes the conditions under which a federated schema object type is updatable. We study the steps involved to systematically map an update request on an external view of a federated schema into the equivalent update(s) on the local databases. We also consider the situation where semantically equivalent object types may not model exactly the same set of objects in the real world. We ensure that the set constraints (EQUAL, SUBSET, DISJOINT) between the instance sets of equivalent object types are not violated after an update.