A Transaction Specification and Management Environment (TSME) is a programmable system that supports implementation-independent specification of application-specific extended transaction models (ETMs) and configuration of transaction management mechanisms (TMMs) to enforce specified ETMs. The TSME can ensure correctness and reliability while allowing the functionality required by workflows and other advanced applications that require access to multiple heterogeneous, autonomous, and/or distributed (HAD) systems. To support ETM specification, the TSME provides a transaction specification language that describes dependencies between transactions. Unlike other ETM specification languages, TSME's dependency descriptors use a common set of primitives, and are enforceable, i.e., can be evaluated at any time during transaction execution to determine whether operations issued violate ETM specifications. To determine whether an ETM can be enforced in a specific HAD system environment, the TSME supports specification of the transactional capabilities of HAD systems, and comparison of these with ETM specifications to determine mismatches. To enforce ETMs that are more restrictive than those supported by the union of the transactional capabilities of HAD systems, the TSME provides a collection of transactional services. These services are programmable and configurable, i.e., they accept instructions that change their behavior as required by an ETM and can be combined in specific ways to create a run-time TMM capable of enforcing the ETM. We discuss the TSME in the context of a distributed object management system. We give ETM specification examples and describe corresponding TMM configurations for a telecommunications application.

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A Transaction Specification and Management Environment (TSME) is a transaction processing system toolkit that supports the definition and construction of application-specific extended transaction models (ETMs). The TSME provides a transaction specification language that allows a transaction model designer to create implementation-independent specifications of extended transactions. In addition, the TSME provides a programmable transaction management mechanism that assembles and configures a run-time environment to support specified ETMs. The authors discuss the TSME in the context of a distributed object management system (DOMS), and describe specifications of extended transactions and corresponding configurations of transaction management mechanisms.>

Future information processing environments will consist of a vast network of heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed computing resources, including computers (from mainframe to personal), information-intensive applications, and data (files and databases). A key challenge in this environment is providing capabilities for combining this varied collection of resources into an integrated distributed system, allowing resources to be flexibly combined, and their activities coordinated, to address challenging new information processing requirements. In this paper, we describe the concept of distributed object management, and identify its role in the development of these open, interoperable systems. We identify the key aspects of system architectures supporting distributed object management, and describe specific elements of a distributed object management system being developed at GTE Laboratories.

The PROBE research project has produced results in the areas of data modeling, spatial/temporal query processing, recursive query processing, and database system architecture for nontraditional application areas, many of which involve spatial data and data with complex structure. An overview of PROBE is provided, focusing on the facilities for dealing with spatial and temporal data. It is shown how the PROBE database system and simple application-specific object classes combine to efficiently support PROBE's spatial data model. It is also shown how an image-database application can be supported using PROBE's data model and spatial query processor. The current status of the PROBE project and future plans are discussed.>

Many capabilities that are needed for recursive applications in engineering and project management are not well supported by the usual formulations of recursion. We identify a class of recursions called “traversal recursions” (which model traversals of a directed graph) that have two important properties they can supply the necessary capabilities and efficient processing algorithms have been defined for them. First we present a taxonomy of traversal recursions based on properties of the recursion on graph structure and on unusual types of metadata. This taxonomy is exploited to identify solvable recursions and to select an execution algorithm. We show how graph traversal can sometimes outperform the more general iteration algorithm. Finally we show how a conventional query optimizer architecture can be extended to handle recursive queries and views.

This paper describes CQLF (CODASYL Query Language, Flat) [MAN081]. CQLF is a high level language for accessing and manipulating data in databases described using the 1981 ANSI dpANS version of the CODASYL Data Description Language [ANSI81]. CQLF has similarities to typical relational languages, such as SQL [ASTR76, CHAM76] and QUEL [STON76]. CQLF provides capabilities for querying and operating on databases described both in a "relational style" (having no CODASYL sets, using only values to represent interrecord relationships, and having records with no arrays), and in a "network style" (using CODASYL sets to represent interrecord relationships, and having records containing arrays).