Database Challenges in Enterprise Information Sharing

Since they first became commercially available, database systems have played a well-defined role in enterprises: managing business-critical information and making it accessible to clients. During the past few years, the database research community has worked to significantly improve data storage, organization, management, and access, as reflected in many of today´s most popular database management systems. Enterprises have been moving their critical data to (mainly relational) databases, and the number of databases, applications, and domains within each enterprise has multiplied. Moreover, by enabling cross-enterprise communication, the Internet has helped convert closely controlled environments into highly distributed, dynamic, large-scale information spaces. In today´s global marketplace, most enterprises must actively share information with their partners, suppliers, and customers to achieve their business goals. The use of message-oriented middleware has become a popular approach to supporting enterprises´ information-sharing needs. Increasingly, database systems must interact with MOM technologies to share and consume information. This has recently inspired the idea of implementing messaging features directly at the database. In this column, the author discusses some of the research issues involved in integrating database and messaging functionalities