Towards bringing database management task in the realm of IT non-experts

Internet enabled services have led to an increase in the size and complexity of the database making the database administration task very complex. This necessitates the hiring of skilled personnel for the management of data, which is a bane for industries, especially in developing countries. We at IBM India research Lab, have been developing technologies (i.e. database administration tools), wherein the database administrator, who may be inexperienced person, can define error-free policies for managing and maintaining the distributed information repositories, and can define data access privileges to users at fine as well as at coarse-grained level using natural language like constructs. These policies represent the actions that need to be carried out when specific database/temporal events occur within the system or externally and are notified to the system. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of our policy based database administration and access control system and outline some of the technical challenges in this area.