An overview of the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory extended entity-relationship database tools

Abstract

In this paper we briefly overview a suite of tools developed at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) for aiding users in defining, querying, and browsing databases developed with commercial relational database management systems (DBMS), using object-oriented constructs. These tools are based on a version of the Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) model and a query language developed by us. They allow users to deal with concise EER structures and queries rather than relational database definitions and queries which are usually large, hard to maintain, and involve terms that obscure the semantics of the application. Using the LBL/EER database tools users are insulated from the underlying DBMS, and thus can avoid learning DBMS specific concepts and query languages.