Reduction Transformations in ORM

Abstract: This paper proposes extensions to the Object-Role Modeling approach to support schema transformations that eliminate unneeded columns that may arise from standard relational mapping procedures. A “unique where true” variant of the external uniqueness constraint is introduced to allow roles spanned by such constraints to occur in unary fact types. This constraint is exploited to enable graphic portrayal of a new corollary to a schema transformation pattern that occurs in many business domains. An alternative transformation is introduced to optimize the same pattern, and then generalized to cater for more complex cases. The relational mapping algorithm is extended to cater for the new results, with the option of retaining the original patterns for conceptual discussion, with the transforms being applied internally in a preprocessing phase. The procedures are being implemented in NORMA, an open-source tool supporting the ORM 2 version of fact-oriented modeling.