Inheritance hierarchy design in object-oriented databases
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Object-oriented database schema design is still mostly an art. One of the difficulties encountered during design is typing conflicts induced by multiple inheritance. In this paper, we propose a method for treating such a kind of conflicts. Our approach to inheritance conflict solving consists of several ingredients. First, we rely on branding, to introduce ‘type equivalence by name’, thus allowing a designer to distinguish between structurally similar but se-mantically different types. However, we offer a heuristic that does not require a designer to explicitly state branding declarations. Second, we describe various kinds of conflicts, and we offer a set of procedures that analyze a schema to discover such conflicts, classify them, offering potential solutions, if possible. The procedures have been conceived for a design system that allows a designer maximum flexibility, while guiding him/her to a correct design.
论文关键词:Multiple inheritance,Inheritance conflicts,Consistency of class hierarchies,Type specialization,Substitutability,Branding
论文评审过程:Received 11 August 1998, Revised 27 October 1998, Accepted 8 March 1999, Available online 13 August 1999.
论文官网地址:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-023X(99)00011-7