Providing database as a service

In this paper, we explore a new paradigm for data management in which a third party service provider hosts ”database as a service ” providing its customers seamless mechanisms to create, store, and access their databases at the host site. Such a model alleviates the need for organizations to purchase expensive hardware and soft-ware, deal with software upgrades, and hire professionals for administrative and maintenance tasks which are taken over by the service provider. We have developed and de-ployed a database service on the Internet, called NetDB2, which is in constant use. In a sense, data management model supported by NetDB2 provides an effective mecha-nism for organizations to purchase data management as a service, thereby freeing them to concentrate on their core businesses. Among the primary challenges introduced by ”database as a service ” are additional overhead of remote access to data, an infrastructure to guarantee data privacy, and user interface design for such a service. These issues are investigated in the study. We identify data privacy as a particularly vital problem and propose alternative solu-tions based on data encryption. This paper is meant as a challenges paper for the database community to explore a rich set of research issues that arise in developing such a service. 1