VDM: Virtual Database Management for Distributed Databases and File Systems

Data is becoming more and more important in the current computing environment and enterprise application. In the grid, many systems and middleware aim to hide the heterogeneity of the data resources and to provide a unified way to access them. However, there are a few systems focusing on data integration which means combining structured and unstructured data residing at different data resources and providing the user a unified way view to manage these data. In this paper, we provide a framework and an implementation of a virtual database management (VDM) system which could integrate different types of data resources and provide the user a virtual database space to manage distributed resources using "SQL-similar" way. The VDM system could be used in many scientific research areas such as the spatial information grid and data integration of different organizations.