Management of work in progress in relational information systems

Abstract

In many complex applications, there is a need to manage work-in-progress. Typically, this requires that each user has a private and non-volatile workspace, in which multiple pieces of work are finished and stored before it is appropriate for these data changes to be made globally accessible to other users. These requirements reflect current work practices in paper-based systems, which ensure security, persistence, privacy and accountability for work-in-progress. This paper describes a technique for implementing work-in-progress that requires no extensions to existing relational database management systems. The semantics of private workspace and work-in-progress are implemented by augmenting the database schema and modifying query and update operations against this augmented schema.