Databases are usually designed to support a specific application domain, thus making data-access and data-sharing a hard and arduous task when database integration is required. Therefore, research projects have been developed in order to integrate several and heterogeneous databases systems, such as specific-domain application tools or even more extreme solutions, as a complete database redefinition and redesign. Considering these open questions and with no definite answers, this work presents

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... ome concepts, strategies and an implementation for heterogeneous databases integration. In this implementation, the DIGE tool was developed to provide access to heterogeneous and geographically distributed databases, using Grid computing, which store locally its data, appearing to the user application, the data are stored locally. By this way, programmers can manipulate data using conventional SQL language with no concern about database location or its schema. Systems Administrators may also add or remove databases on the whole system without need to change the final user application.