An Open Letter to DBMS Vendors: We Need Active Database Systems Now!

by Ronald G. Ross

This column originally appeared in the Jan./Feb. 1996 issue of the Data Base Newsletter.

There is something in your database future that you should want -- sooner, rather than later. It is the shoe that fits the business-rule foot perfectly.

The first comprehensive review of this "new" technology direction is presented in a landmark book, just published, entitled Active Database Systems: Triggers and Rules for Advanced Database Processing.^[1] The preface to this exciting book offers this cogent description.

"Active database systems enhance traditional database functionality with powerful rule processing (or 'trigger') capabilities, providing a uniform and efficient mechanism for database integrity constraints, views and derived data, authorization, statistics gathering, monitoring and alerting, knowledge bases and expert systems, workflow management, and many other database system features and applications. The field of active database systems has been one of the most prominent areas of database research during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Active database capabilities are now finding their way into many of the most popular commercial database management systems, and it is anticipated that active database technology will become a central component of next-generation database management systems and their applications."

The most prominent feature of active database systems is their automatic support for integrity constraints (aka 'rules'). This means rules can be defined declaratively, directly to the system. Under traditional passive DBMS, in contrast, rules are almost entirely an application concern. This means they are largely programmed on a do-it-yourself, procedural basis. The Newsletter believes that this is the root technical cause of the pervasive inconsistencies and the resistance to change that sadly characterize information systems today.

For several years, the Newsletter has gone out on a limb saying that pure object orientation does not offer the breakthrough increase in productivity that companies are seeking for their database systems. We stick by that. Now we go out on another limb: active database systems are the answer.

References

[1] Jennifer Widom and Stefano Ceri, eds. Active Database Systems: Triggers and Rules for Advanced Database Processing. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 1996.

standard citation for this article:

Ronald G. Ross, "An Open Letter to DBMS Vendors: We Need Active Database Systems Now!" Data Base Newsletter, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1996), URL: http://www.BRCommunity.com/a1996/a506.html.