Information system analysis: design consideration of active database / Sharina Mohd Nasir

In the rapidly changing environment of the knowledge economy, an enterprise must
respond to potential fiiture changes when developing and implementing enterprise
systems, which must be thus flexible and integrateable. The concepts of virtual
enterprise, supply chain and B2B e-business have been widely employed in business
development. Since the essence of these concepts is "enterprise integration", the
importance of information sharing among enterprises is increasing. This research is
meant to look at the core of this integration and sharing environment; the active
databases system design by which active database is a database technology for
supporting application in heterogeneous information system. This research presents the
result of an empirical study of design consideration of data model for the active
databases in the enterprise environment. The objectives of this study are to identify the
roles and functionalities of active databases, the most common data model being used
for active databases and the recommendation of the optimized data model for active
databases. The researcher has conducted interview sessions with 7 selected companies
from various business areas to get the primary data by using a set of questionnaires as
the research instrument. The results indicate that the most common type of data model
being used by the involved companies is relational data model and followed closely by
object-oriented data model. The results also reveal that the roles and functionalities of
active databases being implemented includes to supply data at real-time, to detect event,
to execute rules, and for provisioning. The recommended optimized data model for
active databases is object oriented data model by which it generates more advantages
differed to the relational data model. This research also provides several
recommendations at the final section of the report that should be considered upon this
research.