Prototyping DIME, a tightly coupled heterogeneous distributed database system

In this paper, we design and implement a prototypical heterogeneous distributed database system, named DIME (Distributed Information Management). DIME has the following salient properties. First, DIME allows both global retrieval operations and global update operations where different concurrency control schemes are used in different local database systems (LDBSs). Second, DIME implements international standard protocols on the distributed transaction processing and the remote database access. Last, DIME provides distribution transparency, and thus users can generate not only single site queries (including remote site queries) but also inter-site queries without considering data distribution in LDBSs