Database catalog

About: Database catalog is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1769 publications have been published within this topic receiving 42389 citations.

Private information retrieval

Abstract: Publicly accessible databases are an indispensable resource for retrieving up-to-date information. But they also pose a significant risk to the privacy of the user, since a curious database operator can follow the user's queries and infer what the user is after. Indeed, in cases where the users' intentions are to be kept secret, users are often cautious about accessing the database. It can be shown that when accessing a single database, to completely guarantee the privacy of the user, the whole database should be down-loaded; namely n bits should be communicated (where n is the number of bits in the database).In this work, we investigate whether by replicating the database, more efficient solutions to the private retrieval problem can be obtained. We describe schemes that enable a user to access k replicated copies of a database (k≥2) and privately retrieve information stored in the database. This means that each individual server (holding a replicated copy of the database) gets no information on the identity of the item retrieved by the user. Our schemes use the replication to gain substantial saving. In particular, we present a two-server scheme with communication complexity O(n1/3).

Metadata management system for an information dispersed storage system

Abstract: Briefly, the present invention relates to an information dispersal sytem in which original data to be stored is separated into a number of data 'slices' in such a manner that the data in each subset is less usable or less recognizable or completely unusable or completely unrecognizable by itself except when combined with some or all of the other data subsets. These data subsets are stored on separate storage devices as a way of increasing privacy and security. In accordance with an important aspect of the invention, a metadata management system stores and indexes user files across all of the storage nodes. A number of applications run on the servers supporting these storage nodes and are responsible for controlling the metadata. Metadata is the information about the data, the data slices or data subsets and the way in which these data subsets are dispersed among different storage nodes running over the network. As used herein, metadata includes data source names, their size, last modification date, authentication information etc. This information is required to keep track of dispersed data subsets among all the nodes in the system. Every time new data subsets are stored and old ones are removed from the storage nodes, the metadata is updated. In accordance with an important aspect of the invention, the metadata management system stores metadata for dispersed data where: the dispersed data is in several pieces; the metadata is in a separate dataspace from the dispersed data. Accordingly, the metadata management system is able to manage the metadata in a manner that is computationally efficient relative to known systems in order to enable broad use of the invention using the types of computers generally used by businesses, consumers and other organizations currently.

Methods And Systems For Managing Data

Abstract: Systems and methods for managing data, such as metadata. In one exemplary method, metadata from files created by several different software applications are captured, and the captured metadata is searched. The type of information in metadata for one type of file differs from the type of information in metadata for another type of file. Other methods are described and data processing systems and machine readable media are also described.

Automated Generation of Dynamic Data Entry User Interface for Relational Database Management Systems

Abstract: Computer software for, computer apparatus for, and a method of automatically generating a user interface for a relational database comprising extracting schema information from the relational database and automatically generating corresponding schema and user interface metadata, storing the metadata in a repository, and automatically developing from the metadata a user interface appropriate to the relational database.