A mobile agent for asynchronous administration of multiple DBMS servers

Informix-Enterprise Command Center (IECC) is a graphical systems management tool to administer Informix database servers (DBMS) in a distributed network environment. It is designed to administer hundreds of DBMSs across multiple geographic regions from multiple remote clients. DBMS administrative tasks include such operations as start/stop DBMS, create new spaces for database tables, add/delete user privileges, query a database, backup/restore a database, etc., and can be repetitive in nature. The administrator may create a task, run the task on a specific remote server and wait for completion to see the results. However, when the tasks are time consuming and hundreds of remote servers have to be administered, synchronous monitoring for task completion is not practical. The administrators need the ability to schedule a task to run at a specific time on a set of remote servers in an unattended mode and to check the results at a later time. IECC is a client-server application where there is one stationary server administration agent per DBMS server and one or more clients connect to each of the stationary agents. The clients communicate with the stationary agents using CORBA. We first identify the limitations of CORBA in supporting unattended, schedulable tasks on several remote machines and then describe a mobile agent technology that overcomes those problems.