The Mariposa distributed database management system is an ongoing research project at the University of California at Berkeley.
Mariposa addresses fundamental problems in the standard approach to distributed data management.
Furthermore, these systems assume uniformity of all processors and network connections within the system. Data movement in these systems is a very heavyweight operation and is performed manually by a database administrator. The explosive growth of distributed computing, illustrated by the World Wide Web, dictates an entirely different set of assumptions. Mariposa allows DBMSs which are far apart and under different administrative domains to work together to process queries. Furthermore, we have introduced an economic paradigm in which processing sites buy and sell data and query processing services.