An equational object-oriented data model and its data-parallel query language

Abstract

This paper presents an equational formulation of an object-oriented data model. In this model, a database is represented as a system of equations over a set of oid's, and a database query is a transformation of a system of equations into another system of equations. During the query processing, our model maintains an equivalence relation over oid's that relates oid's corresponding to the same "real-world entity." By this mechanism, the model achieves a declarative set-based query language and views for objects with identity. Moreover, the query primitives are designed so that queries including object traversal can be evaluated in a data-parallel fashion.