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This page is intended to introduce the GaianDB technology and how in the VDC project we will use it to enforce access to data. Any code & designs mentioned here do not form part of the Atlas project work per se, but are driving additional capabilities in Atlas and demonstrating a real world scenario for virtualization. Its important to note too that the frameworks we refer to below are open, pluggable.

What is Gaian?

GaianDB is a IBM developed open source project that is available on github . It is effectively a wrapper, and additional VTIs around Apache Derby that supports highly distributed, loosely coupled, self learning, federated database views. For this project we are not concerned with the self-learning aspect, nor necessarily the highly distributed topologies possible but we are making use of it's ability to federate across multiple databases.

In our initial project we will offer two different "views" of the same database. One will look very much like the real database, with technical column names. The other will have more business-oriented names (these names come via glossary lookups) and my have a subset of the columns (technical gawp not needed by a business user). GaianDB is capable of an awful lot more including joining data across multiple databases (multiple rdbms, files, rest API calls).

The use cases explain the process in more detail.

Enforcing data access through gaian

For this project, we want to use metadata to drive enforcement. We will use Apache Ranger as the enforcement technology & build a Ranger plugin for gaianDB in a very similar way to the Ranger plugin for Hive

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