Independent, Open Enterprise Data Integration

Database researchers and practitioners have long espoused the virtues of data independence. When logical and physical representations of data are separated, and when multiple users can see different views of data, then the flexibility of usage, evolution, and performance of a database system is maximized. This tenet has been lost in the marketing crush of Data Warehousing, which prescribes a tight coupling of physical representation and high-level usability. In this paper we describe the Cohera Federated DBMS, which reintroduces data independence to the heterogeneous databases present in today’s enterprises. Cohera’s physical independence features provide a scalable spectrum of solutions for physical design of enterprise-wide data. Its logical independence features remove the distinction between data transformation and querying, by using industry-standard SQL99 as a unified open conversion framework.