The MultiView OODB view system: Design and implementation
Harumi Kuno, Elke Angelika Rundensteiner · Theory and Practice of Object Systems · 1996
Views are an established technique for restructuring and repartitioning the format of data, classes, and schemata so that applications can customize shared data objects without affecting other applications' perceptions of the data. The MultiView system is one of the first OODB systems to support dynamic and updatable materialized object-oriented database views. MultiView is fully functional and is being used for a number of projects. In this article, we describe our system's architecture, the services it provides, and the decisions we made during our implementation. Although the GemStone system we chose for our implementation base offers many features that greatly aided our implementation, it does not support several key object-model properties that are critical for the realization of our design principles. These fundamental properties include multiple classification, dynamic object-restructuring, and the ability to make dynamic changes to the schema. We hence adopted a flexible and powerful technique known as object-slicing to construct the MultiView object model. This object-slicing architecture successfully addresses our requirements. The MultiView system is distinguished by a number of unique features, including the incorporation of virtual classes into the global schema as first-class database citizens, support for capacity-augmenting views (virtual classes that add new extrinsic properties or behavior), view materialization strategies that take advantage of object-oriented modeling features, and a graphical interface that is tailored to provide easy access to the MultiView system. The resulting system preserves all of the capabilities of the underlying GemStone OODB while providing support for dynamic and updatable materialized object-oriented views. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.