Traditional DBMSs are passive: they execute queries or transactions only when explicitly requested to do so by a user or an application program. Many non-traditional applications, such as CIM, process control, hospital monitoring systems, air traffic control, and office workflow control, which require timely response to (critical) situations are not well served by these passive DBMSs. For these applications, it is important to monitor conditions defined on the states of the database, and then, when these conditions occur, invoke specified actions. This project advances previous work on active databases by the PI by i) consolidating earlier research on active databases and ii) extending the active database paradigm to efficiently support non-traditional applications requiring distributed workstation configuration. This extension helps in intelligently staging the data between the database and one or more workstations and also provides a mechanism for update propagation. Distributed condition monitoring is investigated to achieve the above. The results of this research will relieve the application programmer at the workstation from the management of shared data between the workstation and the database as well as maintaining the consistency of shared data. This research is aimed at providing 'staging transparency' at the user level using active database as an underlying abstraction.
