Thinking Big About Tiny Databases

Work on early tiny database systems, like TinyDB [17] and Cougar [23] has shown that a declarative approach can provide a powerful and easy to use interface for collecting data from static sensor networks. These early systems, however, have significant limitations; in particular, they are useful only for low-rate data collection applications on static sensor networks and they don’t integrate well with existing database and IT tools. In this paper, we discuss recent research that has addressed these limitations, showing that similar “tiny database thinking” can provide solutions to much bigger problems, including network protocol specification and mobile and high data rate signal-oriented data processing.