An assessment of non-standard DBMSs for CASE environments

Abstract

Many new non-standard database management systems (NDBMSs) and data models have been proposed with the promise to facilitate the construction of better engineering environments and tools and to solve integration problems in environments. However, there is hardly any evidence or experience to what extent these goals are actually met. This paper summarizes experience gained in several major experiments in which different classes of tools in CASE environments (graphical editors, consistency checkers, transformators) have been built using several design approaches and architectures. It turns out that, regrettably, most NDBMSs proposed so far have quite substantial weaknesses and that their overall value for tool designers is fairly modest. The paper first shows that advantages are only possible if the tool architecture is“redundancy-free” and if the tools operate directly on the database. Assuming this “DB-oriented” architecture, we examine typical features of an NDBMS (schema management, integrity controls, transactions etc.) with respect to their usefulness in tool implementation. We discuss the resulting requirements on the performance and on the design of the API and the runtime kernel of the NDBMS. We also point out useful new features which do not seem to exist in any NDBMS so far.