Early active database efforts: a capsule summary

Over the past few years, the topic of active databases has become an important area of research. A number of efforts-both research prototypes and commercial database management systems (DBMSs)-have addressed support for event-condition-action (ECA) rules in databases. This paper examines the motivations for providing this capability, identifies features that form the basis for supporting active functionality, and provides a capsule summary of active database features of early commercial systems as well as research prototypes. Three broad categories-rule expressiveness, execution semantics and efficiency-are used for the capsule summary.