Abstract
It is claimed that object-oriented databases overcome many of the limitations of the relational data model especially by generalizing the notion of object identification. A clear distinction between objects and values turns out to be essential for the object-oriented approach whereas the relational model is based exclusively on values. Since, however, value uniqueness within scopes is a quite natural constraint for a wide class of applications, identification by value is also of interest for object-oriented datamodels.
Hence, in this paper we concentrate on those classes where the extents are completely representable by values. We formalize some basic concepts of object-oriented databases and show that the finiteness of a database and the existence of finitely representable recursive types are sufficient to decide value-representability.
Another advantage of the relational approach is the existence of structurally determined canonical update operations. We show that this property can be carried over to object-oriented datamodels iff classes are value-representable. Moreover, in this case database consistency with respect to implicitly specified referential and inclusion constraints will be automatically preserved.
This work has been supported in part by research grants from the E.E.C. Basic Research Action 3070 FIDE: “Formally Integrated Data Environments”.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
S. Abiteboul: Towards a deductive object-oriented database language, Data & Knowledge Engineering, vol. 5, 1990, pp. 263–287
S. Abiteboul, P. Kanellakis: Object Identity as a Query Language Primitive, in Proc. SIGMOD, Portland Oregon, 1989, pp. 159–173
A. Albano, G. Ghelli, R. Orsini: A Relationship Mechanism for a Strongly Typed Object-Oriented Database Programming Language, in A. Sernadas (Ed.): Proc. VLDB 91, Barcelona 1991
M. Atkinson, F. Bancilhon, D. DeWitt, K. Dittrich, S. Zdonik: The Object-Oriented Database System Manifesto, Proc. 1st DOOD, Kyoto 1989
F. Bancilhon, G. Barbedette, V. Benzaken, C. Delobel, S. Gamerman, C. Lécluse, P. Pfeffer, P. Richard, F. Velez: The Design and Implementation of O 2 an Object Oriented Database System, Proc. of the ooDBS II workshop, Bad Münster, FRG, September 1988
C. Beeri: Formal Models for Object-Oriented Databases, Proc. 1st DOOD 1989, pp. 370–395
C. Beeri: A formal approach to object-oriented databases, Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. 5 (4), 1990, pp. 353–382
C. Beeri, Y. Kornatzky: Algebraic Optimization of Object-Oriented Query Languages, in S. Abiteboul, P. C. Kanellakis (Eds.): Proceedings of ICDT 90, Springer LNCS 470, pp. 72–88
M. Carey, D. DeWitt, S. Vandenberg: A Data Model and Query Language for EXO-DUS, Proc. ACM SIGMOD 88
M. Caruso, E. Sciore: The VISION Object-Oriented Database Management System, Proc. of the Workshop on Database Programming Languages, Roscoff, France, September 1987
D. Fishman, D. Beech, H. Gate, E. Chow et al.: IRIS: An Object-Oriented Database Management System, ACM ToIS, vol. 5(1), January 1987
S. Khoshafian, G. Copeland: Object Identity, Proc. 1st Int. Conf. on OOPSLA, Portland, Oregon, 1986
W. Kim, N. Ballou, J. Banerjee, H. T. Chou, J. Garza, D. Woelk: Integrating an Object-Oriented Programming System with a Database System, in Proc. OOPSLA 1988
D. Maier, J. Stein, A. Ottis, A. Purdy: Development of an Object-Oriented DBMS, OOPSLA, September 1986
K.-D. Schewe, B. Thalheim, I. Wetzel, J. W. Schmidt: Extensible Safe Object-Oriented Design of Database Applications, University of Rostock, Technical report, September 1991
K.-D. Schewe, I. Wetzel, J. W. Schmidt: Towards a Structured Specification Language for Database Applications, in Proc. Int. Workshop on the Specification of Database Systems, Glasgow, Springer WICS 1991
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schewe, KD., Schmidt, J.W., Wetzel, I. (1992). Identification, genericity and consistency in object-oriented databases. In: Biskup, J., Hull, R. (eds) Database Theory — ICDT '92. ICDT 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 646. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56039-4_52
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56039-4_52
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-56039-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47360-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive