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BFC's Database Library includes the High Performance Information Sharing
facility (Base One InfoShare, for short). This extends the database and distributed computing capabilities of Base One's middleware and programming toolkit, to solve the complex security and implementation problems of sharing data within
very large enterprises and between independent organizations.
Businesses can use BFC InfoShare to provide a convenient means of exchanging
data, such as orders and inventory information, between suppliers and customers. Another example would be using
InfoShare to quickly merge information after an
acquisition, without actually having altered each organization's own
way of keeping its records. For government agencies InfoShare makes it
possible to query and exchange information from many disparate
sources, e.g. for threat monitoring and assessment, or to establish cross organizational inventories and parts replacement capabilities
for emergency and military logistical support.
Base One's High Performance Information Sharing allows organizations to query and share information, irrespective of their database environment or data structure.
Through database independent metadata (including validation rules, indices, and referential constraints),
the target database structure is understood, and the required database operations
can be
automatically executed on the target system.
The file based design of BFC InfoShare also supports importing and exporting non-text objects (images, sounds, documents, video clips, etc.), which often
accompany structured data.
Through XML and web services, InfoShare enables information exchange with J2EE, legacy, and hand-held database applications. This in
turn enables communication between independently managed application systems, each having its own production database(s) to protect.
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What makes the BFC InfoShare possible is the Database Library's
unique "Record Set Files" facility. These are plain text or XML files,
suitable for multi-organization information sharing and data
interchange, as well as rapid bulk loading of records into a database.
Record Set Files are designed to make it easy to store and retrieve
a sequence of records or result set rows, including specially
formatted metadata. (An automatically generated XML schema file, .xsd,
describes the data in the associated XML file.) Record Set Files are
self-describing, self-contained result sets that can be connected to
the data dictionaries of both the source and the target databases.
Programmers, operations staff, and end users can readily create Record Set Files containing the results of simple
or complex database queries. Since reading and writing of records in these files is
easily done through the Base One Database Library interface, interactions
are simplified, access is secure, and error handling is automatically
provided.
Record Set Files are a secure way of leveraging available file storage
outside of the database itself.
To accomplish this, shared file server space is logically "merged" with standard database storage and made accessible across the Internet (via
Base One's Internet Server). A loose association
is thus established between the database and the data extracts contained in the files, without directly exposing the file system. This effectively
extends the database with a vast
amount of "secondary" storage, comprised of Record Set Files addressed through Internet Servers.
Base One application security combined with standard network and
database security may be applied to these files,
so that users can be restricted from accessing them except through authorized Internet Servers.
High Performance Information Sharing ties Record Set Files directly into the
grid and cluster computing (batch processing) facilities, data dictionary, and security system of BFC's Database Library. This makes Record Set Files
ideal for secure, large scale, distributed storage and data sharing networks
involving many different database platforms.
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