A monitoring service for relational databases to support advanced data integration on the grid

The trend of Grid computing towards more data intensive applications, accessing more and more relational databases and requiring advanced data integration, is still upstanding. Metadata information, e.g. for selection of suitable candidates among similar sources and the exclusion of not required ones, plays a vital role for efficient data integration on the Grid. However there is a lack of service oriented monitoring tools providing this metadata for relational data sources. We stay abreast of this development and make relational databases first class citizens in Grid computing by providing a service oriented monitoring tool tailored towards them. To the best-of our knowledge, no research effort has been reported on this so far This paper presents novel usage scenarios needing additional metadata and monitoring information about relational data sources on the Grid - in the areas of query optimization, adaptive query processing and data integration management - and requirements to be fulfilled by a monitoring service providing such information. Our approach supports coarse and fine grained information about heterogeneous relational databases via a uniform interface and provides a homogeneous view on the available metadata. We have evaluated our approach by implementing a research prototype based on the Web Service Resource Framework implementation of the current Globus Toolkit. The functionality and performance of the prototype is demonstrated for commonly used relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle.