A case study in mapping conceptual designs to object-relational schemas

摘要

The recent emergence of object-relational technology into the commercial database market has caused new challenges for the implementation of conceptual database designs. This paper presents our experience with using the Oracle 8 object-relational data model in the implementation of an engineering application described using the EXPRESS conceptual modeling language. EXPRESS is part of the engineering community's Standard for the Exchange of Product Data and can be characterized as a structurally object-oriented modeling language, supporting the notion of entities, entity hierarchies, complex constraints on entity hierarchies, relationships and inverse relationships between entities, and user-defined types.