Heterogeneous relational databases for a grid-enabled analysis environment

Grid based systems require a database access mechanism that can provide seamless homogeneous access to the requested data through a virtual data access system, i.e. a system which can take care of tracking the data that is stored in geographically distributed heterogeneous databases. This system should provide an integrated view of the data that is stored in the different repositories by using a virtual data access mechanism, i.e. a mechanism which can hide the heterogeneity of the backend databases from the client applications. This paper focuses on accessing data stored in disparate relational databases through a Web service interface, and exploits the features of a data warehouse and data marts. We present a middleware that enables applications to access data stored in geographically distributed relational databases without being aware of their physical locations and underlying schema. A Web service interface is provided to enable applications to access this middleware in a language and platform independent way. A prototype implementation was created based on Clarens (C. Steenberg et. al., 2003), Unity (R. Lawrence and K. Barker, 2000) and POOL (http://pool.cern.ch). This ability to access the data stored in the distributed relational databases transparently is likely to be a very powerful one for grid users, especially the scientific community wishing to collate and analyze data distributed over the grid.