Managing Text as Data
Gordana M. Pavlović-Lažetić, Eugene Wong · Very Large Data Bases · 1986
With all their advances, database management systems of the present. generation are designed to handle only data of primitive types, namely, numbers and character strings. Several approaches to extending their capabilities to handle data with higher order semantics exist.. One is to add general abstract data type support. so that users can define such data types easily. In this approach, the DBMS makes no attempt to understand the semantics of userdeflned d&a types. and evaluation of operators on such data are done in applications progranis. As’s supplement, rather than an alternative, one can also extend the query language and its processor so that certain common non primitive data types are directly supported by the DBMS. Of these. tezt and geometric data are probably the two most. prominent examples. This paper deals with the case of text. Direct embedding of complex data in a database management system has obvious advantages, the most important, one being performance.