HODFA: An architectural framework for homogenizing heterogeneous legacy databases

One of the main difficulties in supporting global applications over a number of localized databases and migrating legacy information systems to modern computing environment is to cope with the heterogeneities of these systems. In this paper, we present a novel flexible architecture 1995 to dynamically connect such localized heterogeneous databases in forming a homogenized federated database system and to support the process of transforming a collection of heterogeneous information systems onto a homogeneous environment. We further develop an incremental methodology of homogenization in the context of our HODFA framework, which can facilitate different degrees of homogenization in a stepwise manner, so that existing applications will not be affected during the process of homogenization. © 1995, ACM. All rights reserved.