Access support in object bases

In this work access support relations are introduced as a means for optimizing query processing in object-oriented database systems. The general idea is to maintain redundant separate structures (disassociated from the object representation) to store object references that are frequently traversed in database queries. The proposed access support relation technique is no longer restricted to relate an object (tuple) to an atomic value (attribute value) as in conventional indexing. Rather, access support relations relate objects with each other and can span over reference chains which may contain collection-valued components in order to support queries involving path expressions. We present several alternative extensions of access support relations for a given path expression, the best of which has to be determined according to the application-specific database usage profile. An analytical cost model for access support relations and their application is developed. This analytical cost model is, in particular, used to determine the best access support relation extension and decomposition with respect to the specific database configuration and application profile.