Object-oriented querying of existing relational databases

In this paper, we present algorithms which allow an object-oriented querying of existing relational databases. Our goal is to provide an improved query interface for relational systems with better query facilities than SQL. This seems to be very important since, in real world applications, relational systems are most commonly used and their dominance will remain in the near future. To overcome the drawbacks of relational systems, especially the poor query facilities of SQL, we propose a schema transformation and a query translation algorithm. The schema transformation algorithm uses additional semantic information to enhance the relational schema and transform it into a corresponding object-oriented schema. If the additional semantic information can be deducted from an underlying entity-relationship design schema, the schema transformation may be done fully automatically. To query the created object-oriented schema, we use the Structured Object Query Language (SOQL) which provides declarative query facilities on objects. SOQL queries using the created object-oriented schema are much shorter, easier to write and understand and more intuitive than corresponding S Q L queries leading to an enhanced usability and an improved querying of the database. The query translation algorithm automatically translates SOQL queries into equivalent SQL queries for the original relational schema

Database independent Migration of Objects into an Object-Relational Database

This paper reports on the CERN-based WISDOM project which is studying the serialisation and deserialisation of data to/from an object database (objectivity) and ORACLE 9i.Comment: 26 pages, 18 figures; CMS CERN Conference Report cr02_01

User Defined Types and Nested Tables in Object Relational Databases

Bernadette Byrne, Mary Garvey, ‘User Defined Types and Nested Tables in Object Relational Databases’, paper presented at the United Kingdom Academy for Information Systems 2006: Putting Theory into Practice, Cheltenham, UK, 5-7 June, 2006.There has been much research and work into incorporating objects into databases with a number of object databases being developed in the 1980s and 1990s. During the 1990s the concept of object relational databases became popular, with object extensions to the relational model. As a result, several relational databases have added such extensions. There has been little in the way of formal evaluation of object relational extensions to commercial database systems. In this work an airline flight logging system, a real-world database application, was taken and a database developed using a regular relational database and again using object relational extensions, allowing the evaluation of the relational extensions.Peer reviewe

Querying a Polynomial Object-Relational Constraint Database in Model-Based Diagnosis

Many papers related to Constraint Databases (CDBs) theories exist, including proposals that present frameworks for the treatment of constraints as a new data type. Our proposal presents a new way of storing and manipulating constraints as a usual data, and of making queries about the constraint variables derived from an Object-Relational Constraint Database (ORCDB). In this work, the constraints stored in an ORCDB are only polynomial equality constraints. The proposal is based on Gr¨obner bases, constraint consistency and constraint optimisation techniques. Most works in CDB use spatial-temporal data as a case study, however this work presents an emergent engineering domain, that of fault diagnosis.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología DPI2003-07146-C02-0