Integrating heterogeneous databases: a distributed model

We put forward a distributed model for accessing heterogeneous database systems. Database operations requested by the user are processed in a distributed manner that takes advantage of the inherent parallelism of distributed systems, minimises network traffic and uses almost any general purpose computer on the network. Processing is not confined to DBMS sites but is provided as a distributed service. The design is modular and provides the mechanisms that may be arranged in a variety of ways providing a range of integration paradigms from loosely coupled integrations to more tightly coupled integrations.