An important requirement is to accommodate heterogeneity and maintain autonomy of component database. Myriad is a federated database prototype under development, whose goal is to provide a testbed for investigating alternatives in architecture and algorithms for database integration, query processing and optimization, and concurrency control and recovery. The system incorporates our group's research results in these areas. This paper describes our experiences in the design and implementation of Myriad, and the project management.
Special emphasis is given to discussing design alternatives and their impact on Myriad.
This paper also presents the software engineering principles and the project management techniques we used in developing Myriad and the lessons we learned. We believe these lessons would be useful for practitioners who wish to develop a similar system. Handling heterogeneity and autonomy were prime objectives throughout the prototyping effort.