Secure and Portable Database Extensibility

The functionality of extensible database servers can be augmented by user-de ned functions UDFs. However, the server's security and stability are concerns whenever new code is incorporated. Recently, there has been interest in the use of Java for database extensibility. This raises several questions: Does Java solve the security problems? How does it a ect e ciency? We explore the tradeo s involvedin extending the PREDATOR object-relational database server using Java. We also describe some interesting details of our implementation. The issues examined in our study are security, e ciency, and portability. Our performance experiments compare Javabased extensibility with traditional alternatives in the native language of the server. We explore a variety of UDFs that di er in the amount of computation involved and in the quantity of data accessed. We also qualitatively compare the security and portability of the di erent alternatives. Our conclusion is that Java-based UDFs are a vi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Michael W. Godfrey, Tobias Mayr, Praveen Seshadri, Thorsten von Eicken
• Keywords: Database, Database Server, Extensible Database Servers, SIGMOD 1998, User-de Ned Functions