Evaluation of federated database for distributed applications in e-government

The evolution of the distributed database technologies represents a great opportunity in each sector of public administration to improve the efficiency of e-government, since the distributed technologies improve one of the basic need of the Public Administration, that is the interoperability between their different units, that is strictly related to the ability of retrieving data located on different archives. As known, the federated database approach could represent a solution to data integration, but the existing solutions often don´t take into account real time constraints that are more and more required by the modern e-government scenario. For this reason, in this paper a performance evaluation of relevant technologies implementing the federated database solution is done and compared with the performance of a software architecture consisting of a cloud of web services we have developed to support data integration for the administrative units of a municipal administration. The results confirm the low time performance of the federated data solutions when the integration deals with a large amount of data, whereas the proposed customizable solution shows appreciable high performance.