An Object-Oriented Database System Jasmine: Implementation, Application, and Extension

• Authors: Hiroshi Ishikawa;Yasuo Yamane;Yoshio Izumida;Nobuaki Kawato
• Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
• Year: 1996

New applications such as engineering tasks require complex object modeling, integration of database and programming facilities, and extensibility. We have devised an Object-Oriented DBMS called Jasmine for such advanced applications. This paper describes the implementation, application, and extension of Jasmine in detail. First, we focus on the impact of the design of its Object-Oriented model and language on database implementation technology. We describe what part of traditional relational database technology we extend to handle Object-Oriented features such as object identifiers, complex objects, class hierarchies, and methods. We introduce nested relations to efficiently store and access clustered complex objects. We use hash-based methods to efficiently access nonclustered complex objects. We provide user-defined functions directly evaluated on page buffers to efficiently process method invocation. We devise Object-Oriented optimization of queries including class hierarchies, complex objects, and method invocation. We incorporate dedicated object buffering to allow efficient access to objects through object identifiers. Second, we describe nontrivial applications of Jasmine and discuss the validity of Object-Oriented databases. We focus on a constraint management facility, which can be implemented by taking advantage of the extensibility of Jasmine. The facility includes constraint rules, called design goals, for automatic database population required by engineering applications. Third, we describe a view facility for schema integration also needed by engineering applications in distributed environments. We focus on how we extend Jasmine to implement the facility.