GRIDipedia – The European Grid Marketplace

Treat Multiple Data Sources as One

This common capability is another useful tool for simplifying the other parts of a Grid system. It consists of presenting a number of different data sources as if they are one unified data source. If you want to treat a number of data sources as one, you need to insert a layer between the data providers and the end user or application. This layer will know about the data sources and may perform discovery of a number of data sources. It can also translate commands which it receives to access the different data sources.

Data Federation

This approach is often called federation. Another option is to copy the entire contents of all the databases to a new global database. Federation however, is a mechanism that allows you to avoid that. In some cases it will be impossible to get permission to copy data to another database, perhaps because of licensing issues. You also may not have the storage facilities to copy all the data so you want to leave it where it is. In a rapidly changing environment, it may be less work to create a virtual database that only accesses the data required for a specific query or update from the constituent data sources.

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