Data Management Common Capabilities

An analysis of grid based data management problems has revealed some common capabilities which are potentially useful to businesses starting to use the Grid for data management.

Relationships between common capabilities

The foundation common capability that many of the others relate to and can use is Access to a Remote Data Source. Many of the reasons that data is heterogeneous go hand in hand with data being held in different places, though the two are distinct problems. Being able to homogenise data is only made really useful if you can then use the homogenised data to gain some benefit. Often this involves pulling data from multiple places, something very fundamental to Grid computing. Similarly synchronising data is often done for disaster recovery and fault tolerance. This means that the safest place to have the different data sources is on different physical machines and this means accessing remote data sources. Federation is another example that makes a lot of sense split across multiple systems. Combining access to remote systems with homogenising data access methods can allow some powerful federations to be built.

The problem becomes even worse if you want to replicate write access across multiple data sources in which case all data sources in effect become both masters (they communicate their updates to other data sources) and replicas (they reflect the changes made to other data sources). In that case, it makes sense to split up your data into distinct chunks that only one data source can alter. For example for certain applications it may be appropriate to partition data into distinct geographical sections.