The Sanctuary Project

Roger King
Richard M. Osborne

Department of Computer Science
University of Colorado-Boulder

Contact Information

Roger King

Department of Computer Science
Engineering Center
Campus Box 430
Boulder, CO 80309-0430
Phone: (303) 492-7398
Fax : (303) 492-2844
Email: roger@cs.colorado.edu

WWW PAGE

The Sanctuary Home Page

Keywords

Database, Heterogeneous, Distributed, CORBA, Interoperation, Persistence.

Project Award Information

Diplomat: A System for Building and Maintaining Heterogeneous Database Alliances
Start Date: August 15, 1996
Expires: July 31, 1999 (Estimated)

Project Summary

Sanctuary (formerly Diplomat) is a heterogeneous data source evolution environment, currently under development at the University of Colorado (Boulder). The goal of Sanctuary is to support large scale persistent applications by providing a consistent, evolvable persistence layer. Sanctuary allows for the lightweight interconnection and subsequent evolution of the set of heterogeneous databases (e.g., legacy database systems, modern database systems, flat-files, etc.) that typically make up such a persistence layer.

Goals, Objectives, and Targeted Activities

This year the Sanctuary team will add Microsoft Access to the databases with which the Sanctuary environment will interoperate. In addition, we will add CORBA services to the project, thereby extending the networking capabilities of Sanctuary.

Indication of Success

Sanctuary technology has heavily influenced the data migration strategy for Ardent Software Inc., a database firm based in Westboro, MA with $95 million in assets. In order to help open a (very) large potential market for object-oriented database systems, we have engineered software that will semi-automatically migrate CODASYL database applications to object-oriented systems.

In addition, we are now working with the Catalyst team at SPS/Modus Operandi. With them we are implementing database interoperability for the Catalyst object browser. In particular, we are developing Sanctuary so that it will allow interoperation between Catalyst and Microsoft Access. This functionality is being added at the request of Warner-Robins Air Logistics Center (WR-ALC/LKSE).

Project Impact and Outcome

The Sanctuary project is directly funding three graduate students and one undergraduate student. In addition, a doctoral thesis will come from the work we have done.
We have collaborated with Ardent Software Inc.(see above) and expect to work with Sybase, Inc. this year.

Project References

The Sybil Database Integration and Evolution Environment: An Overview, Roger King, Michael Novak, Christian Och, Richard M. Osborne, Fernando Velez, Advances in Databases and Information Systems,St. Petersburg, Russia, September, 1997.

Sybil: Supporting Heterogeneous Database Interoperability with Lightweight Alliances, Roger King, Michael Novak, Christian Och and Fernando Velez, The Third International Workshop on Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems, Neve Ilan (near Jerusalem), Israel, July, 1997.

Sybil: A System for the Incremental Evolution of Distributed, Heterogeneous Database Layers , Roger King and Michael Novak, The Second Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems Minitrack on Heterogeneous Interoperability, Phoenix, Arizona, August 1996.

Supporting Information Infrastructure for Distributed, Heterogeneous Knowledge Discovery , Roger King and Michael Novak, Workshop on Research Issues on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Montreal, Canada, June 1996.

Area Background

Sanctuary is a heterogeneous database project, meaning that we are concerned with the interoperation of databases that vary in application interface, data model, query language, schema, and/or physical representation. This is a critical need as large companies are constantly reorganizing in our dynamic, global economy. The traditional approach to attacking this problem consists of building large, unwieldy integrated interfaces or schemas that "glue together" multiple, diverse databases. Sanctuary solves the same problem, but in a much more lightweight, dynamic fashion.

Area References

A Federated Architecture for Information Management, D. Heimbigner and D. McLeod, ACM Trans. on Office Information Systems, 3(3), pages 253-278, July 1985.

Interbase: A Multidatabase System. In O. Bukhres and A. Elmagarmid, editors, Object-Oriented Multidatabase Systems, pages 652-683, Prentice Hall, 1996.

Lore: A Database Management System for Semistructured Data, J. McHugh, S. Abiteboul, R. Goldman, D. Quass, J. Widom, SIGMOD Record, 26(3):54-66, September 1997.