Physical Database Design for an Object-Oriented Database System

Object oriented database systems typically o er a variety of structuring capabilities to model complex objects This exibility together with type or class hierarchies and computed attributes methods poses a high demand on the physical design of object oriented databases Similar to traditional databases it is hardly ever true that the conceptual structure of the database is also a good that is e cient internal one Rather data representing the conceptual objects may be structured completely di erent for performance reasons Database systems providing a reasonable amount of data indepen dence allow a physical design that di ers from the logical structure signi cantly Hence the performance of the system can be tailored to the overall transaction load faced The paper presents choices for physical designs that make use of a complex storage model an extended nested relational model A rst prototype of a physical design optimizer is also presented