Toward a database-driven network

The authors suggest that the public telecommunications network is evolving towards a database-driven architecture in which centralized databases are consulted as a part of normal call-processing to provide a variety of intelligent network services. They present a case for implementing the interface to these databases at the data manipulation level, retaining all service-associated intelligence with the application software rather than embedding it in the database management software. New and old applications can then share data without requiring a change to existing software. The authors identify useful data manipulation language primitives and present several nonobvious examples to illustrate the specification of network services using these primitives