The Report Generation Facility is a high-level interface designed and implemented to support coherent access of data stored in a number of stand-alone, independent, database systems served by it. Specifically, the Report Generation Facility provides a menu which allows a user to request one or more standard reports provided by the individual database systems and the Report Generation Facility, or to formulate a query in an English-like query language without having to specify where the requested data reside or how to retrieve them. The Report Generation Facility translates the user's request or query into subtransactions to the individual database systems and submits the substransactions in order to retrieve and format the data requested by the user. Thus, the Report Generation Facility provides a standard way to produce reports based on data stored in the database systems with minimal user effort and expertise. This paper describes its capabilities and architecture.

This paper describes the mutual consistency maintenance mechanism used in a prototype Data Traffic Management System (DTMS), which was designed and implemented to integrate several independent and stand-alone data systems owned by the U. S. Army, Corp of Engineers (CE). The major design constraints were that no modification to the data systems involved were allowed and that the update to each duplicate copy was to be handled as automatically as possible and in a manner approved by the manager of the system containing the copy. The capabilities of the prototype DTMS and the Mutual Consistency Maintenance Subsystem are discussed. The linkage directory used to support mutual consistency maintenance and the mutual consistency maintenance mechanism are described.