A Language Multidatabase System Communication Protocol

             Omran Bukhres and Eva Kühn and Franz Puntigam
    University of Technology Vienna, Institute of Computer Languages
           Argentinierstr. 8, A-1040 Vienna, Austria, Europe
                 {eva,franz}@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at

Rapid growth in the area of Multi Database Systems (MDBS), which involve
both the access of global data and distributed transaction processing, has
created a need for programming languages that provide communication
reliability and powerful synchronization. Traditional sequential languages
extended with a few library routines are limited in their ability to support
the demands of distributed programming. In this paper, we introduce the
requirements of the MDBS. We then present the VPL (Vienna Parallel Logic)
programming language and its features, and illustrate how VPL can be
utilized to implement an MDBS communication protocol. The VPL language
architecture provides a concurrent logic language, as well as features of
both the distributed operating system and the database management system.
These features combine to support the communication and synchronization
required by distributed transaction processing. In addition, our VPL
language is a general purpose logic language that supports a high level
abstraction and a transaction concept suitable for use as an all-purpose
distributed programming language.