Design and implementation of an extended relationship semantics in an ODMG-compliant OODBMS

  • Authors:

  • Hyun-Joo Lee;Sang-Won Lee;Hyoung-Joo Kim

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Chunchun 300, Jangan, Suwon, Kyounggi 440746, South Korea;Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, San 56-1, Shilim, Gwanak, Seoul, South Korea

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Relationships, in addition to entities, are important in real-world database modeling. In particular, many object oriented database applications including CAD/CAM, CASE and multi-media need to model various and complex relationships, especially the 'part-whole' relationship. Without the built-in relationship supports from DBMSs, there is a huge overhead in managing relationships from application development to maintenance, since the relationships should be hard-coded within the application program itself.In this paper, we propose a powerful 'part-whole' relationship model, which naturally extends the ODMG-3.0 object database standard. The proposed relationship model can support almost all of the relationship functionalities existing in the contemporary relational database model and the object oriented data model. In order to design and implement this relationship model, we seamlessly extend the ODMG-3.0 relationship using the inheritance concept. Also, we identify several possible run-time anomalies in implementing the relationship and provide solutions for their problems.