Schema Transformation Without Database Reorganization

Abstract

We argue for avoiding database reorganizations due to schema modification in object-oriented systems, since these are expensive operations and they conflict with reusing existing software components. We show that data independence, which is a neglected concept in object databases, helps to avoid reorganizations in case of capacity preserving and reducing schema transformations. We informally present a couple of examples to illustrate the idea of a schema transformation methodology that avoids database reorganization. © 1993, ACM. All rights reserved.