ACM Computing Surveys 28A(4), December 1996, http://www.acm.org/surveys/1996/RamamrithamApplication/. Copyright © 1996 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. See the permissions statement below.

Krithi Ramamritham

1. In information retrieval applications, databases have been used to store the metadata, in particular, the index structures. Traditional database indexing schemes are not suitable for managing these index structures. Also, the required correctness properties in the presence of updates are not supported by any of the built-in transactional support available in traditional databases.
2. In workflow applications, data consistency is important, but so is the conformance with the steps involved in the process defined by the workflow. The data-centric approach taken by databases makes them inappropriate, as is, for workflow applications.
3. Multimedia databases involve data items which are of continuous types. Their usage patterns are very different from applications for which LRU buffer management policies are suited. The data items are also large and when they are updated, it is inefficient to log the contents of the whole object for recovery purposes.
4. Earth observation systems and several scientific projects like genome mapping require the storage of peta-bytes of data with tera-bytes being added every day. To store, retrieve and manage such massive amounts of digital data, hierarchical storage systems are to be used to achieve a better price-performance ratio. Traditional schemes for query optimization are not suitable for such systems.
5. Embedded applications often involve the use of data with validity intervals attached to them. Data must be correctly accessed while it is valid but does not have persistence properties.
6. While throughput and response times are the metrics of interest for traditional applications, in embedded and multimedia applications, real-time responsiveness is the goal. Quite often, complex Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees are sought.

The first and the foremost is the need to migrate ideas developed by the research community to practice. For example, a lot of work has recently gone into the development of advanced concurrency control, recovery, and, more generally, transaction processing techniques to meet the demands of applications with long-running activities. Unfortunately, not many of the new ideas have migrated into commercial offerings and in fact very few prototypes have been built.

The second issue is how should the database systems be structured to meet the needs of these applications? From the application requirements we reviewed earlier, we observe that almost every component of the database system --- modeling capabilities, indexing schemes, transaction processing techniques, buffer management mechanisms, and query optimization schemes need some type of enhancement to meet the demands of new applications. This being the case, a tool-box type of approach may be suitable. In this approach, commercial systems will offer a package of libraries, containing components that offer the traditional properties as well as some new ones that are tuned to needs of different applications. An application developer can then specify the requirements and the needed support can be tailored by combining these different database components. An identification of the building blocks and a way to integrate them to meet the specified functionality and performance requirements are obvious steps in this direction.

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