ECA rule support for distributed heterogeneous environments

Abstract

The utility and functionality of active capability (event-condition-action or ECA rules) has been well established in the context of databases. Today, most of the commercial relational database management systems (RDBMSs) offer some form of ECA rule capability. In addition, there are several research prototypes that have extended the ECA rule capability to object-oriented database management systems (OODBMSs). Sentinel, developed at the University of Florida is one such prototype that supports an expressive composite event specification language (Snoop), efficient event detection (using generated wrappers), conditions and actions (as a combination of OQL and C++), multiple and cascaded rule processing (using a rule scheduler and nested transactions), a visualization tool, and an editor for dynamic creation and management of rules. In order for the active capability to be useful for a large class of advanced applications, it is necessary to go beyond what has been proposed/developed in the literature. Specifically, the extensions needed beyond the current state-of-the-art active capability are: (i) support active capability for non-database applications as well, (ii) support active capability for distributed environments; that is, allow ECA across applications, and (iii) support active capability for heterogeneous sources of events (whether they are databases or not). The authors address how they are planning on addressing some of the above extensions using a combination of existing components (COTS) and new functionality/services that are culled from their experience in designing and implementing Sentinel.