Two trends in today's corporate world demand distribution: downsizing from centralized mainframe single database environments; and wider integration, connecting finance, engineering, manufacturing information systems for enterprise-wide modeling and operations optimization. The resulting environment consists of multiple databases, at the group level, department level, and corporate level, with the need to manage dependencies among data in all of them. The solution is full distribution, providing a single logical view to objects anywhere, from anywhere. Users see a logical model of objects connected to objects, with atomic transactions and propagating methods, even if composite objects are split among multiple databases, each under separate administrative control, on multiple, heterogeneous platforms, operating systems, and network protocols. Support for production environments includes multiple schemas, which may be shared among databases, private, or encrypted, dynamic addition of schemas, and schema evolution. Finally, the logical view must remain valid, and applications must continue to work, as the mapping to the physical environment changes, moving objects and databases to new platforms.

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