SUXESS: towards a sound unification of extensions of the relational data model

摘要

Recently there has been a considerable interest in extending the relational model of data, in order to make it useful for data modeling in the context of nonstandard applications of database systems. As a result, a variety of models has been proposed, which concur in allowing more structure, complex objects, recursion, or other aspects within relational databases. However, no consensus has been reached yet on how general such an extension should be, or which model is the ‘best’ in the sense that it may become the ‘sucessor’ of the relational model. While answers to both questions probably depend on the respective application, this paper is an attempt to unify notable extended relational models into a common framework, the SUXESS model, in order to clarify the situation and to explore the current modeling power of these approaches.