Authors: Magdi M. A. Morsi, Shamkant B. Navathe
Tags: 1993, conceptual modeling
Due to the various requirements of nontraditional applications, extensibility of database management systems has become a theme for several research projects. In this paper, we present an object-oriented design and implementation of an extensible environment for object-oriented databases. At the outset, we classify extensibility into logical and physical extensibility. We further categorize the three predominent ways to achieve the above extensibility features. Our approach can be categorized as a mixture of the open architecture and open class hierarchy approaches. The schema level is captured as classes and the instance level as objects. Logical extensibility arises because the database schema components, such as Class, InstanceVariable, and Method, are manipulated as user classes and are subject to schema evolution operations. Physical extensibility in the system is provided by making the system implementation information available to the database engineer for adding a new subclass, such as a new access method, to the implementation class hierarchy. Also the methods of the implementation classes can be modified, such as query optimization, resulting in changing the behavior of the system for supporting new operators.Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/BFb0024354
