Minimization of resource consumption for multidatabase query optimization

Due to the autonomy of individual databases, a multidatabase system (MDBS) has no control over the task execution within each database system. This complicates the issue of query optimization in a MDBS. Past researchers tackled this problem mainly by regenerating the cost model of each participating database systems. However a completely autonomous participating database system does nor own the information (data) as well as the mechanism (software) for converting data of one database to another to resolve the data type conflict problems that can occur in any MDBS environment. In addition, unpredictable factors that can drastically deviate the accuracy of a regenerated cost model (in the past research) come into play at unknown time. This confines the processing of an intersite operation (such as a join over two relations of different databases) to the MDBS only. The participating database systems will not be able to share the workload of the MDBS under this circumstance. Hence, minimizing the consumption of system resources of the MDBS is an urgent problem. The authors propose three scheduling algorithms that are used in the MDBS to reduce the processing cost of a multidatabase query. A major difference between the strategies and the past methods is that ours do not require the knowledge of the cost models of the participating databases.