Object-Oriented View Technology: Challenges and Promises

Abstract

With object-oriented database (OODB) systems reaching the status of a maturing technology, increased attention has been given in recent years to the realization of view mechanisms in OODBs. Objectoriented views have the potential for achieving important services, including system interoperability, security, heterogeneous systems integration, schema evolution, data warehousing, and workflow management, to just name a few. Given this rising interest, we report on the MultiView project which, now in its middle phase, is a five-year NSF-funded effort on exploring object-oriented view foundation and implementation issues as well as on applying view technology to a select subset of problems to evaluate its potential. In this paper, we review our results on designing, implementing, and optimizing object-oriented view mechanisms, which include object-centric view materialization algorithms and view redefinition techniques. In this paper, we also outline three promising directions of applying o..