Introduction to Federated database

Overview

Federated systems are a database system that uses a federated server. This server is used to integrate all the other databases under it, which are connected by a computer network. The servers may be situated geographically away from each other.

Benefits of Federated database system

A federated database system has many advantages over a standard database system for many aspects. It has a DB2 instance which helps the user to perform tasks uniformly across the databases. The user can post a query and receive an answer within a short period. The query posted is divided into subqueries and is fed to the individual databases connected to them. Then, the database having the solution is matched, and the answer is compiled by the system together. “This system translates SQL statements into SMC primitives to compute query results over the union of its source databases without revealing sensitive information about individual tuples to peer data providers” ( Bater et al., 2017).

It supports a very sophisticated data analytics with a bare minimum of integration overhead function attached to it. The database allows the administration to gain control over the data sources by controlling them individually. Since the constituent databases are autonomous, the federated database can be used as an alternative measure instead of merging several databases by the system. The user interface is straightforward and user friendly and allows the users to store and view data over it. Also, they can store their data on the federated database for quickly retrieving the data when required.

Advantages of a federated database for a company

Using a federated database can be financially beneficial for the company. The company can cut down costs drastically as they now don’t have to install and implement data warehouses to store data. Instead, a federated database can read and fetch data from multiple databases across various geographically situate systems. It can be helpful in company research projects, which require faster query results and optimized searches. “Traditional view-based database access control requires the enforcer to view the query, the records, or both” (Shay et al., 2019).

Also, the company can now choose not to integrate their databases by choosing to install a federated database. FDBS also supports large scale analytics. The users can also perform streaming along with conducting operations on the databases. As discusses earlier, the database can also fetch data from geographically distant located data servers on separate locations. “Data integration and advanced analysis across on-chain and off-chain data present enterprises with even more complete business insights.” (Vo, et al., 2018).

Conclusion

The Federated database is designed by the designers to integrate the servers under one standard server and enable the users to perform quick searches. Also, the FDBS algorithm allows the company to cut unwanted costs and therefore is very much suitable for medium-sized to small scale industries. Due to its advantages, it is more preferred than other forms of databases and can negate the need for integrating databases.

References:

Bater, J., Elliott, G., Eggen, C., Goel, S., Kho, A., & Rogers, J. (2017). SMCQL: secure querying for federated databases. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 10(6), 673-684.

Shay, R., Blumenthal, U., Gadepally, V., Hamlin, A., Mitchell, J. D., & Cunningham, R. K. (2019). Don’t Even Ask: Database Access Control through Query Control. ACM SIGMOD Record, 47(3), 17-22.\

Vo, H. T., Mohania, M., Verma, D., & Mehedy, L. (2018, December). Blockchain-powered big data analytics platform. In International Conference on Big Data Analytics (pp. 15-32). Springer, Cham.