Object-Oriented Database Management Systems Essays -

Object-Oriented Database Management Systems The construction of Object-Oriented Database Management Systems started in the middle 80's, at a prototype building level, and at the beginning of the 90's the first commercial systems appeared. The interest for the development of such systems stems from the need to cover the modeling deficiencies of their predecessors, that is the relational database management systems. They were intended to be used by applications that have to handle big and complex data such as Computer Aided Engineering, Computer Aided Design, and Office Information Systems. The area of the OODBMSs is characterized by three things. First, it lacks a common data model. There is no common data model although many proposals can be found in the literature. This is a more general problem of all the object-oriented systems not only the database management systems. Since the data model determines the database language of the system, which in turn determines the implementation of the system, we can understand that the differences between the various systems with different data models can be big and substantial. Second is the common theoretical framework. Although there is no standard object-oriented model, most object-oriented database systems that are operational or under development today share a set of fundamental object-oriented concepts. Therefore the implementation issues in OODBMSs that arise due to these concepts are universal. The third characteristic is that of experimental activity. Plenty of prototypes have been implemented and some ! of them became commercial products. There is really a need for applications to handle very complex data and that is why the interest of people in building such systems is so strong. Although there is no consensus on what an OODBMS is and which are the features that differentiate it from other systems, there has been a lot of effort for an agreement on defining the formal characteristics that can stand as the set of specification requirements for the construction of such a system. These should also be used as the set of features that one has to check in order to find out if a system is really an OODBMS. The features of the OODBMS can be divided as follows: * mandatory features: these are the features that one system should have in order to deserve the title OODBMS. * optional features: these are the features that if one system has, should be considered better than another that does not have them, provided that both have all the mandatory features. * open choices: these are features that a designer of a system can choose if and how to implement. They represent the degrees of freedom left to the system designers. An OODBMS should be a database management system and at the same time an object oriented system. The first characteristic is translated to the following features: persistence, concurrency, recovery, secondary storage management, and ad hoc query mechanisms. The second characteristic is translated to the following: composite objects, object-identity, encapsulation, inheritance overriding and late binding, extensibility, and computational completeness of the database language used. Composite objects can be built recursively from simpler ones by applying constructors to them. These simpler objects can be integers, characters, strings, booleans, and in general objects of types that all the programming languages possess. There are various constructors such as list, set, bag, array, tuple, etc. The minimal set of constructors that a system must have is: set (to represent unordered collections of real world objects), list (to represent ordered collections of real world objects), tuple (to represent properties of real world objects). A system that supports composite objects and therefore constructors for their building, should also support operators for the retrieval, insertion, and deletion of their component objects. That means that the database language should be extended in a way that these operators will be included. The identity of an object is what makes it different from all the other objects. This allows the objects to be independent of their values. Therefore the notion of identical objects is introduced: two objects are equal if they have the same values, but are identical if they have the same object identity. The fact that each object possesses an identity facilitates the handling of composite objects since it makes the common use of objects possible and it protects the consistency of the database. If a component object is changed, this change affects all the composite objects that reference it. Due to the object identity, there is no need for replicates, and that is how the consistency of the database is protected. The mechanism of encapsulation allows the hiding of the internal