Relational database: selected writings
Relational database: selected writings
Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
Database language standards: past, present, and future
Proceedings of the international symposium on Database systems of the 90s
Proceedings of the sixteenth international conference on Very large databases
ARIES/IM: an efficient and high concurrency index management method using write-ahead logging
SIGMOD '92 Proceedings of the 1992 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
The Grid File: An Adaptable, Symmetric Multikey File Structure
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
Implementing a generalized access path structure for a relational database system
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
An encoding method for multifield sorting and indexing
Communications of the ACM
A relational model of data for large shared data banks
Communications of the ACM
Safe Referential Structures in Relational Databases
VLDB '91 Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
Notes on Data Base Operating Systems
Operating Systems, An Advanced Course
Extending the ODMG object model with composite objects
Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases
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The relational model of data incorporates fundamental assertions for entity integrity and referential integrity. Recently, these so-called relational invariants were more precisely specified by the new SQL2 standard. Accordingly, they have to be guaranteed by a relational DBMS to its users and, therefore, all issues of semantics and implementation became very important. The specification of referential integrity embodies quite a number of complications including the MATCH clause and a collection of referential actions. In particular, $\hbox{{\tt MATCH PARTIAL}}$ turns out to be hard to understand and, if applied, difficult and expensive to maintain. In this paper, we identify the functional requirements for preserving referential integrity. At a level free of implementational considerations, the number and kinds of searches necessary for referential integrity maintenance are derived. Based on these findings, our investigation is focused on the question of how the functional requirements can be supported by implementation concepts in an efficient way. We determine the search cost for referential integrity maintenance (in terms of page references) for various possible access path structures. Our main result is that a combined access path structure is the most appropriatefor checking the regular MATCH option, whereas $\hbox{{\tt MATCH PARTIAL}}$ requires very expensive and complicated check procedures. If it cannot be avoided at all, the best support is achieved by a combination of multiple $\mbox{B}^*$-trees.