Parallel processing is a typical approach to answer analytical queries on large database. As the size of the database increases, we often try to increase the parallelism by incorporating more processing nodes. However, this approach increases the possibility of node failure as well. According to the conventional practice, if a failure occurs during query processing, the database system restarts the query processing from the beginning. Such temporal cost may be unacceptable to the user. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant query processing mechanism, named PhoeniQ, for analytical parallel database systems. PhoeniQ continuously takes a checkpoint for every operator pipeline and replicates the output of each stateful operator among different processing nodes. If a single processing node fails during query processing, another can promptly take over the processing. Hence, PhoneniQ allows the database system to efficiently resume query processing after a partial failure event. This paper presents a key design of PhoeniQ and prototype-based experiments to demonstrate that PhoeniQ imposes negligible performance overhead and efficiently continues query processing in the face of node failure.

In recent years, society has experienced several changes in its ways and methods of consuming. Nowadays, the diversity and the customization of products and services have provoked that the consumer needs continuously change. Hence, the database systems support e-business processes are required to be timeliness and adaptable to the changing preferences. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS), has been proposed in order to satisfy the enhanced requirements of current on-line e-business applications. Autonomy and decentralization of subsystems help to achieve short response times in highly competitive situations and an autonomous Coordination Mobile Agent (CMA) has been proposed to achieve flexibility in a highly dynamic environment. However, a problem in ADDS is as the number of sites increases, the distribution and harmonization of product information among the sites are turning difficult. Therefore, many users cannot be satisfied quickly. As a result, system timeliness is inadequate. To solve this problem, a self configuration technology is proposed. This technology can configure the system to the evolving situation dynamically for achieving high response. A simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed technology in a large-scale system. Finally, an implementation of this technology is presented.

The turn of the century is witnessing radical changes in the way information services are spreading due to the progress of IT and the constantly increase in the number of users of the WWW. Therefore, the business market is changing its strategy for a modern online business environment. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS), based on autonomous coordinating subsystems, has been proposed as a system architecture in order to meet the innovative e-business requirements for consistency and high response among distributed database systems. Autonomy and decentralization of subsystems help achieving high response time in highly competitive situation and autonomous Mobile Agent based coordination has been proposed to achieve flexibility in a highly dynamic environment. In this paper, it is analyzed the case in which the system size increases; and a multi agent coordination, the same number of mobile agents and sites coexist in the system, is proposed for achieving the timeliness property. The response time in the system is conformed by those transactions that require coordination and those that can be satisfied immediately. In accordance, the distribution of the data in the system for coordination is a medullar issue for the improvement of the response time. A trade-off exits between these two kind of transactions depending on the coordination of the Mobile Agents, the capacity of allocating data among the sites, and as well as the distribution of the data and user requests in the system. In this sense, since the system requires high response time, a data allocation technology in which each mobile agent autonomously determine its own capacity for adjusting data among the sites is proposed. Thus, the system will adapt itself to the dynamic environment. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture and technologies are evaluated by simulation.

Distributed database systems require a commit process to preserve the ACID property of transactions executed on a number of system sites. With the appearance of main memory database system, the database processing time has been reduced in the order of magnitude, since the database access does not incur any disk access at all. However, when it comes to distributed main memory database systems, the distributed commit process is still very slow since the disk logging at several sites has to precede the transaction commit. In this paper, we re-evaluate various distributed commit protocols and come up with a causal commit protocol suitable for distributed main memory database systems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed commit protocol, extensive simulation study has been performed. The simulation results confirm that the new protocol greatly reduces the time to commit the distributed transactions without any consistency problem.

In this paper, an effective index structure for dynamic main memory database systems, which we call the T2-tree, is presented. A notion of a thread pointer is introduced to overcome some of the limitations of the T-tree and the T*-tree. There are several advantages to this structure. First, the T2-tree reduces the number of rotate operations and the overhead required for balancing the tree by restraining new node creation and deletion. Second, the T2-tree shows good performance for sequential search of range queries as these requests can be effectively handled using the successor pointer. Finally, the T2-tree allows for higher space utilization amplicating the aforementioned benefits. These advantages are obtained with minimal changes to the existing T-tree structure. Experimental studies showing evidence of the benefits of the T2-tree are also presented.

This paper surveys recent research activities on three major areas of digital media information base, namely, video database systems as a typical example of temporal application, database systems for mixed reality as an instance of spatial application, and kansei management for digital media retrieval as a case of humanistic feelings application. Current research results by the project Advanced Database Systems for Integration of Media and User Environments are reported.

Our objective is to resolve three types of heterogeneity - data model,database system, and semantic - in heterogeneous databases. The basic framework which we propose for this objective is realized in an autonomous decentralized database system (i.e., an interoperable database system), called Jasmine/M. Users describe their relational or object-oriented data models and schemas locally using the model primitives which Jasmine/M provides as a scripting language. Description using such primitives or scripts constitutes viewports, which have a role to resolve heterogeneity in data models and database systems at local sites. At relational viewports, both relational and object-oriented schemas defined at other sites are translated via scripts and are viewed as relational schemas. Similarly at object-oriented viewports, any schema defined at other sites is viewed object-oriented schemas. Relational and object-oriented views are used to resolve semantic heterogeneity within viewports. This paper describes a step wise approach to resolving the three types of heterogeneity, using scripts, viewports, and views, and its implementation using active objects.

Recent advances of processing speed and window systems in computers, especially workstations, accelerate multi-media data processing (MMDP). Then, a variety of data such as numerics, characters, voice, video, animation and so on, are processed concurrently in a workstation. In data processings, concurrent execution of transactions is a key to improve through-puts. However, concurrent execution without concurrency control may cause inconsistent results. Thus, the concurrency control must be introduced in such systems. However, in MMDP it is ineffective to adopt previous concurrency control methods for ordinal databases since multi-media data are huge and possess a real-time property. This paper discusses concurrency control for MMDP. We propose some new concepts for MMDP, and define a new serializability class called Permissible Serializability which provides high concurrency in MMDP compared with ordinal classes. Then, we propose a concurrency control algorithm TYPE for the Permissible Serializability, and show some simulation results.