The Implementation of a Multi-Backend Database System (MDBS). Part 3. The Message-Oriented Version with Concurrency Control and Secondary-Memory-Based Directory Management.

The multi-backend database systems MDBS uses one minicomputer as the master or controller, and a varying number of minicomputers and their disks as slaves or backends. MDBS is primarily designed to provide for database growth and performance enhancement by the addition of identical backends. No special hardware is required. The backends are configured in a parallel manner. A new backend may be added by replicating the existing software on the new backend. No new programming or reprogramming is required. A prototype MDBS is being implemented in order to carry out design verification and performance evaluation. This report is the third in a series which describes the MDBS implementation. In the report, an overview of MDBS and its process structure is first given. Then, the inter-process communication messages between processes within a minicomputers, i.e., the controller and a backend or any two backends are described.