AutonomousDB: A Tool for Autonomic Propagation of Schema Updates in Heterogeneous Multi-database Environments

One of the biggest challenges of building and maintaining applications with long life cycles, is dealing with the inevitable changes in requirements that occur over time. Many of these applications depend on DBMS that most often suffer direct consequences in their schemas due to changes in the reality that they model. In this work, we propose a new alternative to the issue of schema evolution in multi-database environments, which uses concepts of autonomic computing in DBMS to propagate updates in schemas replicated within the same environment, thus ensuring their consistency. Our prototype counts with a multi-agent system, which executes events for updating schemas in the target DBMS, which may be of different platforms. Repetitive tasks which are performed in different databases to ensure the evolution of replicated schemas are thus eliminated, freeing the DBA to do other tasks that are more important, such as analysis, database design and strategic management of data.