Object-Oriented Database Design

Abstract

In spite of the fact that relational databases still hold the first place in the market, object-oriented databases are becoming, each day, more widely accepted. Relational databases are suitable for traditional applications supporting management tasks such as payroll or library management. Recently, as a result of hardware improvements, more sophisticated applications have emerged. Engineering applications, such as CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design/ Computer Aided Manufacturing), CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) or CIM (Computer Integrating Manufacturing), office automation systems, multimedia systems such as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) or medical information systems, can be characterized as consisting of complex objects related by complex interrelationships. Representing such objects and relationships in the relational model implies that the objects must be decomposed into a large number of tuples. Thus, a considerable number of joins is necessary to retrieve an object and, when tables are too deeply nested, performance is dramatically reduced (Bertino and Marcos, 2000).