Secure and portable database extensibility

  • Authors:

  • Michael Godfrey;Tobias Mayr;Praveen Seshadri;Thorsten von Eicken

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Computer Science Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Computer Science Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Computer Science Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • SIGMOD '98 Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

The functionality of extensible database servers can be augmented by user-defined 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 affect efficiency?We explore the tradeoffs involved in 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, efficiency, and portability. Our performance experiments compare Java-based extensibility with traditional alternatives in the native language of the server. We explore a variety of UDFs that differ in the amount of computation involved and in the quantity of data accessed. We also qualitatively compare the security and portability of the different alternatives. Our conclusion is that Java-based UDFs are a viable approach in terms of performance. However, there may be challenging design issues in integrating Java UDFs with existing database systems.