Designing storage structures for management of materialised methods in object-oriented databases

Abstract

Efficient execution of an object method has a great impact on a query response time. Optimising access to data returned by methods is difficult as methods are written in a high-level programming language and their code is usually hidden to a query optimiser in order to preserve encapsulation. Moreover, estimating the cost of executing a method is another serious problem. In this paper we propose a framework for the materialisation of method results in object databases. In our approach, the materialisation of method m results also in the materialisation of intermediate results of methods called from m. We call this technique hierarchical materialisation. The hierarchical materialisation technique was implemented and evaluated in a prototype based on the FastObjects t7 object-oriented database. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.