Abstract

It is claimed that object oriented databases (OODBs) overcome many of the limitations of the relational model. However, the formal foundation of OODB concepts is still an open problem. Even worse, for relational databases a commonly accepted datamodel existed very early on whereas for OODBs the unification of concepts is missing. The work reported in this paper contains the results of our first investigations on a formally founded object oriented datamodel (OODM) and is intended to contribute to the development of a uniform mathematical theory of OODBs. A clear distinction between objects and values turns out to be essential in the OODM. Types and Classes are used to structure values and objects repectively. Then the problem of unique object identification occurs. We show that this problem can be be solved for classes with extents that are completely representable by values. Such classes are called value-representable. Another advantage of the relational approach is the existence o...

Citations