Open active services for data-intensive distributed applications

Applications are now highly distributed, heterogeneous and scalable. They comprise autonomous, loosely coupled components, some of them being database management systems, Web servers, etc. Considering such a framework, database technology has to evolve towards cooperation and integration. We propose open and distributed active services that can be used for specifying and generating event and rule managers that support cooperation and interaction between distributed database software (i.e. applications and systems). Event managers are brokers supporting anonymous event-passing communications. Rule managers are able to support global (business) rules and execute them using different policies that are adapted to specific application needs. Both managers can reconfigure and adapt themselves with respect to application requirements and to their environment.