OODB support for providing transparent schema changes

Schema updates on shared object-oriented databases (OODBs) are almost always prohibited because of the risk of making existing application programs obsolete when run against the modified schema. We have proposed a solution approach, called Transparent Schema Evolution (TSE), that successfully addresses this problem by integrating schema evolution capabilities with object-oriented view facilities. In TSE, users interface with the OODB exclusively through their customized database view. In this paper, we identify key features required from OODB systems in order to provide such transparent schema change support, including multiple classification, dynamic reclassification, and flexible restructuring. Such features are currently not supported by commercial OODB systems. We thus propose a novel object-oriented modeling paradigm that overcomes these limitations. Key concepts of the proposed solution include object-slicing techniques and object-oriented views. In this paper, we describe a prototype implementation of the object-slicing paradigm that we have built to demonstrate the feasibility of our TSE approach.