RSQL - a query language for dynamic data types

Database Management Systems (DBMS) are used by software applications, to store, manipulate, and retrieve large sets of data. However, the requirements of current software systems pose various challenges to established DBMS. First, most software systems organize their data by means of objects rather than relations leading to increased maintenance, redundancy, and transformation overhead when persisting objects to relational databases. Second, complex objects are separated into several objects resulting in Object Schizophrenia and hard to persist Distributed State. Last but not least, current software systems have to cope with increased complexity and changes. These challenges have lead to a general paradigm shift in the development of software systems. Unfortunately, classical DBMS will become intractable, if they are not adapted to the new requirements imposed by these software systems. As a result, we propose an extension of DBMS with roles to represent complex objects within a relational database and support the exibility required by current software systems. To achieve this goal, we introduces RSQL, an extension to SQL with the concept of objects playing roles when interacting with other objects. Additionally, we present a formal model for the logical representation of roles in the extended DBMS

Role-based Data Management

Database systems build an integral component of today’s software systems and as such they are the central point for storing and sharing a software system’s data while ensuring global data consistency at the same time. Introducing the primitives of roles and their accompanied metatype distinction in modeling and programming languages, results in a novel paradigm of designing, extending, and programming modern software systems. In detail, roles as modeling concept enable a separation of concerns within an entity. Along with its rigid core, an entity may acquire various roles in different contexts during its lifetime and thus, adapts its behavior and structure dynamically during runtime. Unfortunately, database systems, as important component and global consistency provider of such systems, do not keep pace with this trend. The absence of a metatype distinction, in terms of an entity’s separation of concerns, in the database system results in various problems for the software system in general, for the application developers, and finally for the database system itself. In case of relational database systems, these problems are concentrated under the term role-relational impedance mismatch. In particular, the whole software system is designed by using different semantics on various layers. In case of role-based software systems in combination with relational database systems this gap in semantics between applications and the database system increases dramatically. Consequently, the database system cannot directly represent the richer semantics of roles as well as the accompanied consistency constraints. These constraints have to be ensured by the applications and the database system loses its single point of truth characteristic in the software system. As the applications are in charge of guaranteeing global consistency, their development requires more effort in data management. Moreover, the software system’s data management is distributed over several layers, which results in an unstructured software system architecture. To overcome the role-relational impedance mismatch and bring the database system back in its rightful position as single point of truth in a software system, this thesis introduces the novel and tripartite RSQL approach. It combines a novel database model that represents the metatype distinction as first class citizen in a database system, an adapted query language on the database model’s basis, and finally a proper result representation. Precisely, RSQL’s logical database model introduces Dynamic Data Types, to directly represent the separation of concerns within an entity type on the schema level. On the instance level, the database model defines the notion of a Dynamic Tuple that combines an entity with the notion of roles and thus, allows for dynamic structure adaptations during runtime without changing an entity’s overall type. These definitions build the main data structures on which the database system operates. Moreover, formal operators connecting the query language statements with the database model data structures, complete the database model. The query language, as external database system interface, features an individual data definition, data manipulation, and data query language. Their statements directly represent the metatype distinction to address Dynamic Data Types and Dynamic Tuples, respectively. As a consequence of the novel data structures, the query processing of Dynamic Tuples is completely redesigned. As last piece for a complete database integration of a role-based notion and its accompanied metatype distinction, we specify the RSQL Result Net as result representation. It provides a novel result structure and features functionalities to navigate through query results. Finally, we evaluate all three RSQL components in comparison to a relational database system. This assessment clearly demonstrates the benefits of the roles concept’s full database integration

Towards a Role-Based Contextual Database

Traditional modeling approaches and information systems assume static entities that represent all information and attributes at once. However, due to the evolution of information systems to increasingly context-aware and self-adaptive systems, this assumption no longer holds. To cope with the required flexibility, the role concept was introduced. Although researchers have proposed several role modeling approaches, they usually neglect the contextual characteristics of roles and their representation in database management systems. Unfortunately, these systems do not rely on a conceptual model of an information system, rather they model this information by their own means leading to transformation and maintenance overhead. So far, the challenges posed by dynamic complex entities, their first class implementation, and their contextual characteristics lack detailed investigations in the area of database management systems. Hence, this paper, presents an approach that ties a conceptual role-based data model and its database implementation together, to directly represent the information modeled conceptually inside a database management system. In particular, we propose a formal database model to describe roles and their contextual information in compartments. Moreover, to provide a context-dependent role-based database interface, we extend RSQL by compartments. Finally, we introduce RSQL Result Net to preserve the contextual role semantics as well as enable users and applications to both iterate and navigate over results produced by RSQL. In sum, these means allow for a coherent design of more dynamic, complex software systems

Position paper: Runtime Model for Role-based Software Systems

In the increasingly dynamic realities of today's software systems, it is no longer feasible to always expect human developers to react to changing environments and changing conditions immediately. Instead, software systems need to be self-aware and autonomously adapt their behavior according to their experiences gathered from their environment. Current research provides role-based modeling as a promising approach to handle the adaptivity and self-awareness within a software system. There are established role-based systems e.g., for application development, persistence, and so on. However, these are isolated approaches using the role-based model on their specific layer and mapping to existing non-role-based layers. We present a global runtime model covering the whole stack of a software system to maintain a global view of the current system state and model the interdependencies between the layers. This facilitates building holistic role-based software systems using the role concept on every single layer to exploit its full potential, particularly adaptivity and self-awareness

A Combined Formal Model for Relational Context-Dependent Roles (Extended)

Role-based modeling has been investigated for over 35 years as a promising paradigm to model complex, dynamic systems. Although current software systems are characterized by increasing complexity and context-dependence, all this research had almost no influence on current software development practice, still being discussed in recent literature. One reason for this is the lack of a coherent, comprehensive, readily applicable notion of roles. Researchers focused either on relational roles or context-dependent roles rather then combining both natures. Currently, there is no role-based modeling language sufficiently incorporating both the relational and context-dependent nature of roles together with the various proposed constraints. Hence, this paper formalizes a full-fledged role-based modeling language supporting both natures. To show its sufficiency and adequacy, a real world example is employed

A CONTEXT-AWARE ROLE-PLAYING AUTOMATON FOR SELF-ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

Role-based modeling and programming will become more and more important to realize big, complex, and adaptive software systems [Zhu and Alkins, 2006]. Therefore, the Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm is extended with roles, where objects can begin to play roles and drop roles dynamically at runtime. Playing a role is changing the object’s type which can add or change behavior. Roles are a dynamic view of the state and behavior of objects at runtime at a point of time highlighting their relations to other objects. Self-adaptive systems (SAS) are naturally context-aware systems. Thus, adaption is always seen in a context e.g., because a sensor value passes a specified limit, or because the reason could be derived from the knowledge about the past and presence. However, there is currently no common concept describing the situation (e.g., the context or other conditions that lead to a specific adaption) in which objects begin to play and stop playing roles. Current role programming languages therefore suffer from the problem of tangling of different aspects i.e., the context logic, the role adaption logic, and the business logic. This leads to less understandable and unmaintainable code [Antinyan et al., 2014]. Thomas Kühn has drafted in his major thesis [Kühn, 2011] a behavioral model to describe role binding with storyboards. This allows to model concisely role reconfigurations, but the concept lacks the ability to specify context-dependent behavior which is crucial for self-adaptive systems, and is built on top of an outdated understanding of the role concept which lacks compartments. The concept of storyboards will be extended with the ability to address context-dependent conditions. Compartments will be added in order to adapt the current wider understanding of the concept of roles. This will result in a concept for context-aware storyboards with roles which provide a separation of concerns approach w.r.t. the above named concerns. The concept will be implemented as automaton and will be evaluated on a use case. The use case is a robotic co-working scenario based on the idea of [Haddadin et al., 2009].:1. Introduction 1.1. Motivation 1.2. Outline 2. Background and Concepts 2.1. Role-Based Design 2.1.1. Roles and Role Models 2.1.2. Role Binding 2.1.3. Role Runtime Systems 2.2. Modeling Concepts for a Role-Playing Automaton 2.2.1. Models and Meta-models 2.2.2. Behavioral Diagrams and Automata 2.2.3. Storyboards 2.3. Relevant Software Architectures 2.3.1. Context-Aware Computing 2.3.2. Self-Adaptive Systems 2.3.3. Event-Based Systems 2.4. Summary 3. Requirements Analysis 3.1. Problem Analysis 3.2. Goals and Requirements 3.3. Technology Analysis and Selection 3.3.1. Pattern Matching 3.3.2. Model Execution 3.4. Summary 4. Concept for a Role-Playing Automaton for Self-Adaptive Systems 4.1. Context-Aware Storyboards with Roles 4.2. Syntax and Semantics 4.2.1. Overview 4.2.2. Story Pattern 4.2.3. Transitions, Events, and Guards 4.2.4. Control Nodes 4.2.5. Variable Binding 4.3. Meta-Model 4.4. Differences to Related Concepts 4.4.1. Relation to UML Activity Diagrams 4.4.2. Differences to Story Diagrams 4.4.3. Differences to Storyboards with Roles 4.5. Summary 5. Implementation 5.1. Architecture 5.2. Implementation 5.2.1. Grammar and Meta-model 5.2.2. Model Transformation 5.2.3. Graph Transformation 5.2.4. The Role Model 5.2.5. Context and Events 5.2.6. Model Execution and Validation 5.3. Summary 6. Related Work 6.1. Context-Aware Middleware for URC System 6.2. Context Petri Nets 6.3. Agent-Based and Context-Oriented Approach for Web Services Composition 6.4. Model Driven Design of Service-Based Context-Aware Applications 6.5. Summary 7. Evaluation 7.1. Use Case Robotic Co-Worker 7.2.Results 7.3.Summary 8. Conclusion and FutureWork 8.1.Conclusion 8.2.FutureWork A. Appendices A.1. Grammar for Storyboards with Roles A.2. Exemplary of a StoryDiagram A.3. Meta-Model of Context-Aware Storyboards With Role

IDEAS-1997-2021-Final-Programs

This document records the final program for each of the 26 meetings of the International Database and Engineering Application Symposium from 1997 through 2021. These meetings were organized in various locations on three continents. Most of the papers published during these years are in the digital libraries of IEEE(1997-2007) or ACM(2008-2021)