A great deal of corporate data is buried in network devices-such as PBX messaging/email platforms, and data networking equipment-where it is difficult to access and modify. Typically, the data is only available to the device itself for its internal purposes and it must be administered using either a proprietary interface or a standard protocol against a proprietary schema. This leads to many problems, most notably: the need for data replication and difficult interoperation with other devices and applications. MetaComm addresses these problems by providing a framework to integrate data from multiple devices into a meta-directory. The system allows user information to be modified through a directory using the LDAP protocol as well as directly through two legacy devices: a Definity(R) PBX and a voice messaging system. In order to prevent data inconsistencies, updates to any system must be reflected appropriately in all systems. This paper describes how MetaComm maintains consistency when data integration is performed across several systems with no triggers and with extremely weak typing and transactional support. We also discuss implementation details and experiences.

We present an architecture for global customization of web content, by w h i c h a w eb site can customize content for each visitor based on the activities undertaken by the same user on other, unrelated sites.Our architecture distinguishes itself in the privacy mechanisms it provides: each u s e r c o n trols what information a merchant can learn about her activities at other merchants, and each merchant controls to what other merchants the information it contributes is revealed.To a c hieve t h i s w e i n troduce novel data protection mechanisms for merchants and users.We further describe aspects of a prototype implementation of our architecture.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.To copy

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directories are being rapidly deployed on the web. They are currently used to store data like white pages information, user profiles, and network device descriptions. LDAP directories offer scalability advantages over current database technologies, as well as being more flexible. However, as users begin to use them for Directory Enabled Networking tasks such as provisioning network services, allocating resources, reporting, managing end-to-end security, and offering mobile users customized features that follow them, LDAP's limited functionality becomes a significant barrier to progress. For example, LDAP directories do not have active database functionality (i.e., triggers). However, triggers are necessary for monitoring changes to directories and taking appropriate actions, just as they are for databases. Such functionality is crucial to take full advantage of proposals such as the Directory Enabled Network (DEN) initiative. Currently, trigger functionality is non-standardized for LDAP and each vendor's solution is non-portable. We built the Lightweight Trigger Access Process (LTAP) gateway to provide a portable way to add triggers to a LDAP directory. We describe the trigger language, the gateway's implementation, as well as our experiences gained both during implementation and from our users. LTAP is currently being used in several projects. LTAP can be downloaded at http://ltap.bell-labs.com. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ode is an active database system and environment based on the object paradigm. Triggers are the basic ingredient of active databases. Ode triggers are event-action pairs. An event can be a composite event (i.e. an event composed from other events). Composite events are detected by translating the event specifications into finite state machines. In this paper, we describe the integration and implementation of composite event-based triggers into the Ode object database. We focus on implementation details such as the basic trigger events supported, the efficient posting of these events, the handling of transaction-related events and the integration of triggers into a real database. We also describe the run-time facilities used to support trigger processing and describe some experiences we gained while implementing triggers. We illustrate Ode trigger facilities with a credit card example.

In this paper we present an object oriented data model for VLSI/CAD data. A design data manager (DDB) based on such a model has been implemented under the UNIX/C++ environment. It has been used by a set of diverse VLSI/CAD applications of our organization. Benchmarks have shown it to perform better as compared to commercial object oriented database systems. In conjunction with the ease of data access, the data manger served to improve software productivity and a modular program architecture for our CAD system.