The Active Use of Constraints in the Design of Object - Oriented Database Applications

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This research is directed at the investigation of a tool that makes use of knowledge about constraints to support the development of user views and update propagation semantics for object-oriented database applications. Informally, an object-oriented database system is a system that combines the use of abstraction in semantic modeling with programming language concepts such as abstract data types as a means of protecting the semantics of data. The proposed database design support tool will actively make use of data semantics through an approach known as constraint analysis. Using constraint analysis, the effects of data constraint are made explicit in the desing phase to support the specification of user views and database update operations. The use of constraint analysis as a design tool, however, assumes that data will be accessed in a database environment supported by a sophisticated contraint enforcement system that enforces both inherent schema constraints and explicit constraints expressed using a constraint language. An expected result of the proposed research is the development of an object-oriented database system with a constraint management and enforcement facility that allows data constraints to plan an integral part in the specification of database software.