Promises and Realities of Active Database Systems

We confront the promises of active database systems with the result of their use by application developers. The main problems encountered are iusufficient methodological support in analysis and design, the lack of standardization, missing development and administration tools for triggers, and weak performance. We concentrate on performance because we discovered it is one the maiu reasons that makes users reluctant to use active rules iu the development of large applications. We show, using simple concrete examples, that optimizing large applications is rendered difficult by the separation of transactions and triggers and the misunderstanding of their subtle interactions. We argue that tools, which provide assistance to programmers, database administrators, and database designers to optimize their applications and master application evolution is strongly needed.