Applications of Heraclitus in Telecommunications Information Processing
Marcia A. Derr, Jacques Dur, Michael E. Doherty, Richard B. Hull, Mohammed Rupawalla · 1996
: There are many applications which arise in telecommunications information processing in which it is useful, and often necessary, to create and access multiple hypothetical states. These might correspond to future states reflecting pending updates (such as customer service orders), or hypothetical alternative states that would arise in the exploration of different solutions to a given problem. In this paper we show how the Heraclitus family of database programming languages can be applied to satisfy such requirements. The fundamental capability provided by Heraclitus is to capture database updates as deltas; these are syntactic objects which can be efficiently manipulated by application programs and database users. Deltas can be used to represent pending or hypothetical updates to the database. We also consider the issue of incorporating Heraclitus functionalities into legacy database systems currently in use by telecommunications companies. This research was supported in part by NS...