Evaluation and selection of file organization—a model and system
Communications of the ACM
A relational model of data for large shared data banks
Communications of the ACM
An Introduction To DIAM Levels Of Abstraction In Accessing Information
ACM '78 Proceedings of the 1978 annual conference
Specification of stored data structures and desired output results in DIAM II with FORAL
VLDB '75 Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
A generalized end-user facility architecture for relational database systems
VLDB '77 Proceedings of the third international conference on Very large data bases - Volume 3
Data structures and data accessing in data base systems past, present, future
IBM Systems Journal
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Quantitative descriptions of data populations have played an important role in the data base design process, particularly where simulation has been employed. The new levels of fidelity and representation-independence made possible by recent advances in data description languages warrant a renewed interest in this technique. This paper presents a new approach to describing the quantitative characteristics of a data base at the representation-independent level. The terminology is based on the Entity Set level of the Data Independent Accessing Model (DIAM I), but the concept is applicable to the Relational Model or the Concept Class Model of DIAM II. The first section discusses the concepts of the approach. Beginning with the simple case of a steady-state system with independent probabilities, the discussion proceeds to introduce constant-change and variable-change dynamics and several orders of conditional biases. Section two presents a highly simplified but illustrative example to show the technique's ease of application and give some insight to its potential in a problem solving environment. Finally, an appendix is provided which reduces the technique to practicality through a comprehensive set of data collection forms that could be used as the basis for a powerful data dictionary facility.