Database Support for Versions and Alternatives of Large Design Files

  • Authors:
  • Randy H. Katz;Tobin J. Lehman

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706./ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1984

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Abstract

We identify the roles played by design versions and alternatives in an engineering database. The obvious way to implement versions is to maintain each in a separate collection of files. Because several versions must be kept on line in a design environment, the approach leads to large disk requirements. We develop B-tree-based storage structures to encode versions as ``negative'' differential files. Our objective is to keep the disk requirements small. We discuss the effect of enormous amounts of cheap archival storage (write-once optical digital disks) on the proposed structures. We have implemented versions in the Wisconsin storage system (WiSS), an experimental database component developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.