Abstract
More work is needed on devising practical, but theoretically well-founded procedures for doing object-oriented database (OODB) design. Besides being practical and having formal properties, these design procedures should also be flexible enough to allow for peculiarities that make applications unique. In this paper, we present and discuss an OODB design procedure that addresses these problems. The procedure we discuss is practical in the sense that it is based on a common family of conceptual models and in the sense that it does not expect users to supply esoteric, difficult-to-discover, and hard-to-understand constraints (such as multivalued dependencies), nor does it make hard-to-check and easy-to-overlook assumptions (such as the universal relation assumption). At the same time, the procedure is well-founded and formal, being based on a new theoretical result that characterizes properties of interest in designing complex objects. It is also flexible and adaptable to the peculiarities of a wide variety of applications.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
F. Bancilhon, C. Delobel, and P. Kanellakis (eds.), Building an Object-Oriented Database System: The Story of O 2, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo, California, 1992.
C. Batini, S. Ceri, and S.B. Navathe, Conceptual Database Design. The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc., Redwood City, California, 1992.
J. Biskup,“Database schema design theory: achievements and challenges,” Proceedings of the 6th International Conference, CISMOD'95. The proceedings appeared as Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1006, pp. 14–44, Bombay, India, November 1995.
E.F. Codd,“Recent investigations in relational database systems,” Proceedings of the 1974 IFIP Conference, pp. 1017–1021,1974.
D.W. Embley and T.W. Ling,“Synergistic database design with an extended entity-relationship model,” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Entity-Relational Approach, pp. 118–135, Toronto, Canada, October 18–20, 1989.
D.W. Embley, B.D. Kurtz, and S.N. Woodfield, Object-oriented Systems Analysis: A Model-driven Approach, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1992.
R. Fagin, A.O. Mendelzon, and J.D. Ullman, “A simplified universal relation assumption and its properties,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 343–360, September 1982.
R. Fagin, “Degrees of acyclicity for hypergraphs and relational database schemes,” Journal of the ACM, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 514–550, July 1983.
T.A. Halpin, Conceptual Schema & Relational Database Design, 2nd Edition, Prentice-Hall, Sydney, Australia, 1995.
W. Kent, “Consequences of assuming a universal relation,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 539–556, December 1981.
W. Kim, “Editorial Directions,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 237–238, September 1995.
D. Maier, The Theory of Relational Databases, Computer Science Press, Rockville, Maryland, 1983.
V.M. Markowitz and A. Shoshani, “Representing extended entity-relationship structures in relational databases: a modular approach,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 423–464, September 1992.
W.Y. Mok, Y.K. Ng, and D.W. Embley, “A normal form for precisely characterizing redundancy in nested relations,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 77–106, March 1996.
M.A. Roth, H.F. Korth, and A. Silberschatz, “Extended algebra and calculus for nested relational databases,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 389–417, December 1988.
T.J. Teorey, Database Modeling & Design: The Fundamental Principles, 2nd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, California, 1994.
J.D. Ullman,“The U.R. strikes back,” Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, pp. 10–22, Los Angeles, California, March 1982.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mok, W.Y., Embley, D.W. (1996). Transforming conceptual models to object-oriented database designs: Practicalities, properties, and peculiarities. In: Thalheim, B. (eds) Conceptual Modeling — ER '96. ER 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1157. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019931
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019931
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61784-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70685-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive