How helpful is an object-oriented language for an object-oriented database model?
Olga De Troyer, J. Keustermans, Robert Meersman · VUBIR (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) · 1986
One of the more interesting features of an Object-Oriented Database Model would seem to be the ability to allow proper subtyping of concepts. Now, most object-oriented languages have an “inheritance” construct. Intuitively one should be able to match these constructs with each other in some way. To get a feel of this we take one particular OO Data Model, the Binary Relationship Model and one particular OO Language, Object Pascal, and try to express conceptual database update procedures. We find the results are not very satisfying to the conceptual model designer because of a deep problem: one seems to need an extra level of abstraction in the OO language. The problem is not specific to the examples chosen. We discuss how it could be handled by a specific form of dynamic typing.