Fragments: A Mechanism for Low Cost Data Integration
Steven P. Reiss, Steven P. Reiss · 1995
Control integration has become widely used as the primary means for combining a variety of programming tools in an environment. Data integration, on the other hand has not been nearly as successful. The primary reason for this is the high cost of data integration when it is viewed as a program database. Both the complexity of the needed database system and the high cost of modifying all the programming tools to use the database have made data integration prohibitively expensive. In this paper we propose a new means for data integration based on a database of fragments. Fragments are references to portions of a file. They have a source, type and associated attributes. The database and fragments are accessed through an object-oriented query language. This mechanism promises to provide most of the capabilities typically associated with data integration without the large costs. It allows the use of existing tools and multiple languages and can offer full support for the software engineerin...