Foundations of Object Oriented Database Concepts
Klaus Dieter Schewe, Bernhard Thalheim, Ingrid Wetzel · 1992
It is claimed that object oriented databases (OODBs) overcome many of the limitations of the relational model. However, the formal foundation of OODB concepts is still an open problem. Even worse, for relational databases a commonly accepted datamodel existed very early on whereas for OODBs the unification of concepts is outstanding. Our research in Hamburg and Rostock is directed towards a formally founded object oriented datamodel (OODM) and to contribute to the development of a uniform mathematical theory of OODBs. This report contains the results of our first investigations on the OODM. A clear distinction between objects and values turns out to be essential in the OODM. Types and Classes are used to structure values and objects repectively. Then the problem of unique object identification occurs. We show that this problem can be be solved for classes with extents that are completely representable by values. Such classes are called valuerepresentable. The finiteness of a database and the existence of finitely representable rational tree types are sufficient to decide value-representability. Another advantage of the relational approach is the existence of structurally determined