A Coordination Language for Databases

TL;DR

Klaim-DB is a coordination language designed for modeling distributed database applications, providing high-level abstractions, formal semantics, and a type system to ensure data integrity and atomicity.

Contribution

It introduces Klaim-DB, a novel coordination language that redefines tuple spaces as databases with formal semantics and type safety for distributed data management.

Findings

Formal semantics for Klaim-DB established

Type system prevents runtime data errors

Application example demonstrates modeling benefits

Abstract

We present a coordination language for the modeling of distributed database applications. The language, baptized Klaim-DB, borrows the concepts of localities and nets of the coordination language Klaim but re-incarnates the tuple spaces of Klaim as databases. It provides high-level abstractions and primitives for the access and manipulation of structured data, with integrity and atomicity considerations. We present the formal semantics of Klaim-DB and develop a type system that avoids potential runtime errors such as certain evaluation errors and mismatches of data format in tables, which are monitored in the semantics. The use of the language is illustrated in a scenario where the sales from different branches of a chain of department stores are aggregated from their local databases. Raising the abstraction level and encapsulating integrity checks in the language primitives have benefited the modeling task considerably.