Deciding on the equivalence of a relational schema and an object-oriented schema

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to decide on the equivalence of a conventional relational schema and a corresponding object-oriented schema. We assume that the two schemas are consistent and implemented a prototype to handle the process. First, characteristics of the relational schema are derived and lead to a graph consistent with the entity-relationship diagram. Second, a graph that include all nesting and inheritance links is derived based on characteristics of the object-oriented schema. Third, we investigate the equivalence of the two graphs in order to decide on relational attributes equivalent to object-oriented attributes with primitive domains, and on the equivalence between relational foreign keys and object-oriented attributes with non-primitive domains.