Using Annotations to Support Multiple Kinds of Versioning in an Object-Oriented Database System

Abstract

The concept of annotation from object-oriented languages is adapted to object-oriented databases. It is shown how annotations can be used to model activities such as constraint checking, default values, and triggers. Annotations also are an appropriate way to model different versioning concepts. This paper discusses three kinds of versioning—histories, revisions, and alternatives—and demonstrates how each one can be modeled effectively using annotations. The use of annotations also allows other kinds of versioning to be defined extensibly, and arbitrary combinations of versions can be handled easily. © 1991, ACM. All rights reserved.