Distinguished Lecturer Series

Generic Model Management: A Database Infrastructure for Schema Manipulation

Phil Bernstein

Microsoft Research

Friday, January 28, 2005
10:30am - SENSQ 5317

Refreshments at 10:00am

Abstract

In today's large enterprises, meta data management problems consume a large fraction of the development and maintenance of complex data-oriented applications, such as data warehouses, application integration, and B2B e-commerce. Despite 30 years of research on database support for these problems, solutions are problem-specific and data-model-specific, and they require much object-at-a-time programming. To make solutions more generic and easier to program, we propose a higher level interface, called Model Management. Its main operators include Match, Merge, Diff, ModelGen and Compose. These operators manipulate models and mappings as bulk objects, where a model is a complex information structure, such as a relational schema, XML schema, UML model, or software configuration, and a mapping represents a transformation between two models. We explain the main operators, show how to use them to solve classical meta data management problems, summarize some research results in this area, and list many issues in need of further research.

Biography of Speaker

Philip A. Bernstein is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Corporation. Over the past 25 years, he has been a product architect at Microsoft and at Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. During that time, he has published over 100 articles on the theory and implementation of database systems, and two books on transaction processing. He is an ACM Fellow, a winner of the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.