DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OBJECT DEFINITION LANGUAGE

Object-oriented databases (OODB) have emerged to be a very active research area in database systems. Complex objects and behavior encapsulation are two very important concepts in object-oriented data modelling. In previous approaches, behavioral aspects of complex objects are generally defined directly in the implementation programming language. It is thus difficult for the database users to define application specific semantics for complex objects. In this thesis, we examine the behavioral aspects of complex objects in various OODB applications. In order to enable the database users to specify user semantics, we have designed and implemented a language called ODL (Object Definition Language). By using ODL, the user can define methods for complex objects in terms of methods defined for the constituent objects. An important component of ODL is the implementation of the concept of behavioral constraint, which, contrary to the traditional integrity constraints specified as boolean expressions, represents the relationship between various database operations and user-defined methods. Behavioral constraints can be specified in ODL. We have implemented an ODL code generator, which generates C++ code with Object Store DML. This code can be integrated with application programs and in the system thus obtained, the behavioral constraints can be enforced automatically.

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