Advanced primitives for changing schemas of object databases

Abstract

Currently, existing Object Database Systems (ODBSs) perform schema changes by means of primitives closely related to their respective data model. Software Engineering (SE) applications, Object Methodologies (OM) and designers building up object database schemata require a more abstract level. This paper addresses new facilities for updating a schema filling the gap between object design and object programming. A set of advanced primitives, so-called ”High Level Primitives”, is presented to cope with these requirements. The semantics of these new primitives and how to maintain a schema consistent after such a schema update are the main contributions of this paper. We discuss issues on implementation on top of the commercial ODBS O2and consider related work.