A Synthesis of Complex Objects and Object-Orientation

Complex Object models, semantic or knowledge representation models on the one side, and objectoriented models on the other side are currently considered candidates for future databases. Either of them have their particular strongpoints and weaknesses, such that up to now no single model could be identified to suit all needs. Database models provide limitted structuring capabilities and too poor semantics and object-oriented approaches suffer from their navigational one-object-at-a-time style of operation. In this paper we show, how the approaches can be mixed into a single, coherent approach that eliminates all of these deficiencies and nevertheless preserves their advantages: flexibility through powerful structuring primitives, rich semantics, and encapsulation, and efficiency through optimizable descriptive, set-oriented query and update languages. We call this symbiosis of Complex Objects with the object-oriented paradigm “Complex-Object-Orientation”.