Integration of CORBA and object relational databases

Abstract

CORBA is widely accepted as the open international standard for modelling and building comprehensive distributed systems. In most cases, CORBA architects have adopted relational databases for storage of persistent data. Among the issues that usually face architecture designers considering how to combine CORBA and standard relational database standards are fault tolerance, performance, and the extensibility and scalability of the systems. The research team involved with this paper found that the ODMG object database concept is useful to solve the issues encountered when integrating CORBA and relational database standards. The reference architecture, which the team devises, integrates CORBA and relational databases without compromise on the necessary transactional properties. The CORBA standard object transaction service and concurrency control service are reused. The team also develop an object relational data modelling tool-Latte-that supports the overall design intention as well the development paradigms for the proposed architecture. The implementation of the system is useful to CORBA, ODMG, and relational database architects because it provides a unified modelling and programming paradigm capable of solving the problems of managing mission-critical distributed data. Thus, we present a case study of combining different international standards to build a comprehensive system. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.