Design and Implementation of a Centralized Data Directory for a Distributed Database Management System.

This thesis refined and implemented a design of a centralized data directory for distributed database management system DDBMS begun in a previous study for use in the AFIT Digital Engineering Laboratory. This directory contains information about all the data stored in the distributed databases. By following the life cycle programming method to develop the system this project completed a requirements analysis, detailed design and implementation of the directory as well as partial implementation of the DDBMS to test the operation of the centralized data directory. The requirements analysis outlined the functions of the central site which contained the centralized directory. This project used Structured Analysis Design Technique SADT diagrams to document the central sites functions. These included initializing the DDBMS updating the centralized directory sending changes to other local directories at the remote sites reconfiguring the DDBMS and servicing requests for information in the directory. Next the project refined the detailed design of the directory processing and depicted the functional decomposition in structure charts. The following step implemented on two microcomputers only those modules necessary to show the centralized directory worked. Tests verified that one DDBMS node which received a query could request and receive location information from the other node.