An extensible distributed data base system

Extensibility is one of many claims of improved performance being made for distributed processing systems. Extensibility means system properties, such as "incremental growth and configuration flexibility," "highly adaptable to changes in workload," "incremental replacement and/or upgrading of components (both hardware and software)" and "easily expanded in both capacity and function."2 Although the need for extensibility is strongly felt, research results for it appear to be still far from satisfactory. 3,4 A distributed data base system is one example of distributed processing. Although its usefulness is well recognized, the research in this area is also still very much in its infancy. MINI MET , a transaction-oriented homogeneous distributed data base system, has contributed towards the understanding of the distributed data base system. 6,9 The MINI MET research put more emphasis on the lower level of system control so that any data model can be built on it. The data base system described in this paper is a relational data base, one of whose characteristics, among others, is capacity extensibility. Extensibility, in this paper, means the following three things: