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

Unified event model for object databases

Most object databases offer little or no support for eventbased programming over and above what is provided in the programming language. Consequently, functionality offered by traditional database triggers and event-condition-action (ECA) rules has to be coded in each application. We believe that a notion of triggers should be offered by object databases to facilitate application development and a clear separation of concerns. We present a general and flexible event model that unifies concepts from programming languages and database triggers. We describe an implementation of the model and how it can support the requirements of a rich variety of applications