A platform to support object database research

Databases play a key role in an increasingly diverse range of applications and settings. New requirements are continually emerging and may differ substantially from one domain to another, sometimes even to the point of conflict. To address these challenges, database systems are evolving to cater for new application domains. Yet little attention has been given to the process of researching and developing database concepts in response to new requirements. We present a platform designed to support database research in terms of experimentation with different aspects of database systems ranging from the data model to the distribution architecture. Our platform is based on the notion of metamodel extension modules, inspired by proposals for adaptive and configurable database management systems. However, rather than building a tailored system from existing components, we focus on the process of designing new components. To qualitatively evaluate our platform, we present a series of case studies where our approach was used successfully to experiment with concepts designed to support a variety of novel application domains

From static methods to role-driven service invocation : a metamodel for active content in object databases

Existing object databases define the behaviour of an object in terms of methods declared by types. Usually, the type of an object is fixed and therefore changes to its behaviour involves schema evolution. Consequently, dynamic configurations of object behaviour are generally not supported. We define the notion of role-based object behaviour and show how we integrated it into an existing object database extended with a notion of collections to support object classification and role modelling. We present a metamodel that enables specific services to be associated with objects based on collection membership and show how such a model supports flexible runtime configuration of loosely coupled services