OQL_SERF: an ODMG implementation of the template-based schema evolution framework
Kajal T. Claypool, Jing Jin, Elke Angelika Rundensteiner · 1998
With rapid progress in application development and technologies, there is an increasing need to specify and handle complex schema changes of databases. The existing support for schema evolution in current OODB systems is limited to a pre-defined taxonomy of simple schema evolution operations with fixed semantics. We have proposed an extensible framework for schema transformations to address this open problem. The SERF framework succeeds in giving the user the flexibility to define the semantics of their choice, the extensibility of defining new complex transformations, and the power of reusing these transformations through the notion of templates. In this paper, we now report on OQLSERF, the realization of our concepts based on the ODMG standard. We have utilized not only the ODMG object model, but have also used OQL as the database transformation language, the ODMG Metadata Repository for providing meta information utilized by the templates and Java's binding of OQL. We have develope...