Over the last decade, database system products have been extended to provide support for defining, storing, updating, indexing and retrieving complex data with full transaction semantics. Oracle, IBM, Informix and others have used extensibility technology to build database system extensions for text, image, spatial, audio/video, chemical, genetic and other types of complex data. Currently, we find database systems being deployed in support of e-commerce. In many cases, these e-commerce database applications use only simple SQL data types to represent items such as office supplies, computers, books and CDs. There is also a large and important set of e-commerce applications that employ complex data formats such as EDI, SWIFT and HL7. The database extensibility features initially developed to support text, spatial and similar forms of complex data are now being used to build e-commerce applications. Thus, database extensibility technology is evolving into an important mechanism to enable the development of e-commerce systems.

Summary form only given as follows. Application integration addresses the need for diverse applications to be able to communicate with each other across application boundaries and across platform boundaries. Business objects extend the type system of relational databases to deal with the needs of application integration. The requirements of business application integration include event-based information workflow to manage the exchange of data, well-formed business objects to reduce the number of application interfaces and to keep the semantic integrity of the information exchange intact, seamless transformation to integrate the validation and construction of interfacing business objects, and heterogeneous transport adapters to move business objects from one place to another. The objective of this paper is to examine the requirements for business objects and their role in application integration and to show examples of how the Mercator product addresses these requirements.

Issues of reliability include identification of errors in relation to a particular object system. Experience in large system developments indicates that objective error identification is not a simple procedure. Particular aspects of error identification and analysis for a large, complex, real-time system are addressed. In addition, some measures taken, as a result of this experience, to address these issues of reliability with respect to system definition are discussed.

The key to software reliability is to design, develop, and manage software with a formalized methodology which can be used by computer scientists and applications engineers to describe and communicate interfaces between systems. These interfaces include: software to software; software to other systems; software to management; as well as discipline to discipline within the complete software development process. The formal methodology of Higher Order Software (HOS), specifically aimed toward large-scale multiprogrammed/multiprocessor systems, is dedicated to systems reliability. With six axioms as the basis, a given system and all of its interfaces is defined as if it were one complete and consistent computable system. Some of the derived theorems provide for: reconfiguration of real-time multiprogrammed processes, communication between functions, and prevention of data and timing conflicts.