Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Data and Knowledge Bases

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Data and Knowledge Bases

Improving Usability and Responsiveness
1988, Pages 180-192
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Data and Knowledge Bases

INCORPORATING DATA TYPES IN AN EXTENSIBLE DATABASE ARCHITECTURE

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Abstract

The limited set of data types and the difficulty of incorporating new ones in current DBMSs prevent many applications from efficiently using a DBMS to store data. We discuss the merits of introducing externally defined types (EDTs) to bridge the gap between the data structures of the application programming language and the data model of the database. We show that the DBMS needs to know the set of functions to be called on an EDT to permit easy use of EDTs both in programming languages and by the DBMS, and we propose ways to make the definition and implementation of new types in the DBMS easier on both the DBMS and the type implementor. Functions are central to our approach, as they may be invoked from within internal DBMS components by suitable extensions. We examine how to create access paths to support externally denned predicate functions by materialization or physical clustering, and how query transformations may help reduce the number of different access methods and storage structures. By treating EDTs as abstractions, the amount of mechanism which must be added to the DBMS can be kept small.

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1

This work was performed while the author was at IBM Research, on leave from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Alexanderstrasse 24, 6100 Darmstadt, Germany.

2

The list of authors is presented in reverse alphabetical order!

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