Practical approaches to maintaining referential integrity in multidatabase systems

An important problem in multidatabase systems is maintaining semantic integrity constraints among the multiple databases in the system. The paper investigates practical approaches to enforcing referential integrity, one of the most important classes of constraints. Referential integrity is important in its own right and also provides a good starting point for studying more general classes of constraints. The semantics of referential integrity are relatively well known and understood, yet they have much in common with more general classes of constraints. The paper considers what enforcement mechanisms can be used in the context of the transaction models or interaction models which are widely found in practice today: the queued message model, the remote procedure call model, the distributed transaction model, and the local transaction dialog model.<>