A distributed real-time database (DRTDB) is a database distributed over a network on several nodes and where the transactions are associated with deadlines. The issues of concern in this kind of database are data consistency and the ability to meet deadlines. In addition, there is the possibility that the nodes, on which the database is distributed, are heterogeneous. This means that the nodes may be built on different platforms and written in different languages. This makes the integration of these nodes difficult, since data types may be represented differently on different nodes. The common object request broker architecture (CORBA), defined by the Object Management Group (OMG), is a distributed object computing (DOC) middleware created to overcome problems with heterogeneous sites.
The project described in this paper aims to investigate the suitability of CORBA as a middleware in a DRTDB. Two extensions to CORBA, Fault-Tolerance CORBA (FT-CORBA) and Real-Time CORBA (RT-CORBA) is of particular interest since the combination of these extensions provides the features for object replication and end-to-end predictability, respectively. The project focuses on the ability of RT-CORBA meeting hard deadlines and FT-CORBA maintaining replica consistency by using replication with eventual consistency. The investigation of the combination of RT-CORBA and FT-CORBA results in two proposed architectures that meet real-time requirements and provides replica consistency with CORBA as the middleware in a DRTDB.