Abstract

TRANSFORMING DATABASES WITH RECURSIVE DATA STRUCTURES Anthony Kosky Advisors: Susan Davidson and Peter Buneman. This thesis examines the problems of performing structural transformations on databases involving complex data-structures and object-identities, and proposes an approach to specifying and implementing such transformations. We start by looking at various applications of such database transformations, and at some of the more significant work in these areas. In particular we will look at work on transformations in the area of database integration, which has been one of the major motivating areas for this work. We will also look at various notions of correctness that have been proposed for database transformations, and show that the utility of such notions is limited by the dependence of transformations on certain implicit database constraints. We draw attention to the limitations of existing work on transformations, and argue that there is a need for a more general formalism...

Citations