The thesis examines issues of consistency maintenance in advanced database systems; primarily, multidatabase systems. A multidatabase system consists of a number of pre-existing local database systems. A local database system is unaware of its participation in the multidatabase system and, likewise, the multidatabase system has no knowledge of local transaction executions. Enforcing global constraints in such an environment is clearly a challenging task. A methodology for constraint enforcement is presented which utilises existing technology for the replication of data in an attempt to enforce global consistency. While it is shown to have limited applicability, it is nonetheless an interesting study and serves to qualify the limits of such a solution. An alternative method for global consistency maintenance, which relies on the existence of triggers at each of the participant local databases, is then discussed. This method is shown to be particularly suitable when the issue of local database autonomy is of concern. It is, however, only suited to systems where each of the local databases provides a capability for triggering external actions based on the occurrence of particular database events. As a result of this methodology, the requirement for identification of enforcement actions which access sites where the instigating transaction originated becomes apparent. Such enforcement actions can cause deadlock in certain circumstances when they are executed at the same site which initially triggered the global constraint. This issue is dealt with in a novel way by proposing a methodology for statically checking relations at each participant site with a view to determining their susceptibility to this form of deadlock. The method, a graphical representation of the constraint enforcement process in a distributed system, is also shown to have other desirable properties. Arising from the requirements of other work within the thesis, an algorithm for detecting all cycles in a given directed graph is presented. It is shown that, while the well-known adaptation of the Depth First Search algorithm to cycle detection in directed graphs can detect the existence of cycles, it cannot in all circumstances identify all cycles. An algorithm which performs this task is presented together with an analysis of its complexity and correctness. In a more general sense, the issue of deferred constraint enforcement is discussed. Several scenarios where deferred enforcement of constraints is required are presented, together with a method for detecting the presence of cyclic dependencies within a given database schema.

Le cloud computing a eu un impact majeur sur la gestion des données, conduisant à une prolifération de nouvelles solutions évolutives de gestion des données telles que le stockage distribué de fichiers et d’objets, les bases de données NoSQL et les frameworks de traitement de données. Cela a conduit également à une grande diversification des interfaces aux SGBD et à la perte d’un paradigme de programmation commun, ce qui rend très difficile pour un utilisateur d’intégrer ses données lorsqu’elles se trouvent dans des sources de données spécialisées, par exemple, relationnelle, document et graphe.Dans cette thèse, nous abordons le problème du traitement de requêtes avec plusieurs sources de données dans le cloud, où ces sources ont des modèles, des langages et des API différents. Cette thèse a été préparée dans le cadre du projet européen CoherentPaaS et, en particulier, du système multistore CloudMdsQL. CloudMdsQL est un langage de requête fonctionnel capable d’exploiter toute la puissance des sources de données locales, en permettant simplement à certaines requêtes natives portant sur les systèmes locauxd’être appelées comme des fonctions et en même temps optimisées, par exemple, en exploitant les prédicats de sélection, en utilisant le bindjoin, en réalisant l’ordonnancement des jointures ou en réduisant les transferts de données intermédiaires.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une extension de CloudMdsQL pour tirer pleinement parti des fonctionnalités des frameworks de traitement de données sous-jacents tels que Spark en permettant l’utilisation ad hoc des opérateurs de map/filter/reduce (MFR) définis par l’utilisateur en combinaison avec les ordres SQL traditionnels. Cela permet d’effectuer des jointures entre données relationnelles et HDFS. Notre solution permet l’optimisation en permettant la réécriture de sous-requêtes afin de réaliser des optimisations majeures comme le bindjoin ou le filtrage des données le plus tôt possible.Nous avons validé notre solution en implémentant l’extension MFR dans le moteur de requête CloudMdsQL. Sur la base de ce prototype, nous proposons une validation expérimentale du traitement des requêtes multistore dans un cluster pour évaluer l’impact sur les performances de l’optimisation. Plus précisément, nous explorons les avantages de l’utilisation du bindjoin et du filtrage de données dans des conditions différentes. Dans l’ensemble, notre évaluation des performances illustre la capacité du moteur de requête CloudMdsQL à optimiser une requête et à choisir la stratégie d’exécution la plus efficace. / Cloud computing is having a major impact on data management, with a proliferation of new, scalable data management solutions such as distributed file and object storage, NoSQL databases and big data processing frameworks. This also leads to a wide diversification of DBMS interfaces and the loss of a common programming paradigm, making it very hard for a user to integrate its data sitting in specialized data stores, e.g. relational, documents and graph data stores.In this thesis, we address the problem of query processing with multiple cloud data stores, where the data stores have different models, languages and APIs. This thesis has been prepared in the context of the CoherentPaaS European project and, in particular, the CloudMdsQL multistore system. CloudMdsQL is a functional query language able to exploit the full power of local data stores, by simply allowing some local data store native queries to be called as functions, and at the same time be optimized, e.g. by pushing down select predicates, using bind join, performing join ordering, or planning intermediate data shipping.In this thesis, we propose an extension of CloudMdsQL to take full advantage of the functionality of the underlying data processing frameworks such as Spark by allowing the ad-hoc usage of user defined map/filter/reduce (MFR) operators in combination with traditional SQL statements. This allows performing joins between relational and HDFS big data. Our solution allows for optimization by enabling subquery rewriting so that bind join can be used and filter conditions can be pushed down and applied by the data processing framework as early as possible.We validated our solution by implementing the MFR extension as part of the CloudMdsQL query engine. Based on this prototype, we provide an experimental validation of multistore query processing in a cluster to evaluate the impact on performance of optimization. More specifically, we explore the performance benefit of using bind join and select pushdown under different conditions. Overall, our performance evaluation illustrates the CloudMdsQL query engine’s ability to optimize a query and choose the most efficient execution strategy.

Multidatabases are being actively researched as a relatively new area in which many aspects are not yet fully understood. This area of transaction management in multidatabase systems still has many unresolved problems. The problem areas which this dissertation addresses are classification of multidatabase systems, global concurrency control, correctness criterion in a multidatabase environment, global deadlock detection, atomic commitment and crash recovery. A core group of research addressing these problems was identified and studied. The dissertation contributes to the multidatabase transaction management topic by introducing an alternative classification method for such multiple database systems; assessing existing research into transaction management schemes and based on this assessment, proposes a transaction processing model founded on the optimal properties of transaction management identified during the course of this research. / Computing / M. Sc. (Computer Science)

Multidatabases are being actively researched as a relatively new area in which many aspects are not yet fully understood. This area of transaction management in multidatabase systems still has many unresolved problems. The problem areas which this dissertation addresses are classification of multidatabase systems, global concurrency control, correctness criterion in a multidatabase environment, global deadlock detection, atomic commitment and crash recovery. A core group of research addressing these problems was identified and studied. The dissertation contributes to the multidatabase transaction management topic by introducing an alternative classification method for such multiple database systems; assessing existing research into transaction management schemes and based on this assessment, proposes a transaction processing model founded on the optimal properties of transaction management identified during the course of this research. / Computing / M. Sc. (Computer Science)