We present a novel approach for supporting Composite Objects (CO) as an abstraction over the relational data. This approach brings the advanced CO model to existing relational databases and applications, without requiring an expensive migration to other DBMSs which support CO. The concept of views in relational DBMSs (RDBMS) gives the basis for providing the CO abstraction. This model is strictly an extension to the relational model, and it is fully upward compatible with it. We present an overview of the data model. We put emphasis in this paper on showing how we have made the extensions to the architecture and implementation of an RDBMS (Starburst) to support this model. We show that such a major extension to the data model is in fact quite attractive both in terms of implementation cost and query performance. We introduce a CO cache for navigation through components of a CO. With this technique, the performance of navigation through COs, which has been of a concern in RDBMSs in the past, is in fact quite satisfactory. We present our practical experience in using this facility. We show that our work on CO enables existing RDBMSs to incorporate efficient CO facilities at a low cost and at a high degree of application reusability and database sharability
