Research Assistant: S. Goel
Sponsors: Army Research Laboratory (Software Technology Branch), AT&T, UNISYS, Purdue Research Foundation
Emerging "next generation" applications such as multimedia and engineering (CAD/CAE) require managing databases that are more complex than those in applications such as banks and airline reservation systems. In O-Raid we are exploring the object-oriented approach as a means for overcoming limitations of current database management systems. These limitations typically include a lack of support for complex data structures and operations, integrity checking, and triggers.
O-Raid integrates the relational and object models. It extends the distributed relational system Raid. We have investigated selective replication of object components to tune replication granularity to meet both the availability and performance requirements of distributed applications, and at the same time minimize storage costs. We have proposed federated objects as a pragmatic approach to data integration.
We are currently working on clustering (grouping) of component objects
in a complex object at the server in the client/server based
object-oriented
database systems. We are investigating a client-driven grouping
approach.
A client requires run-time and statically analyzed information for
the method
to make its decisions. We introduce a navigation structure called
complex object skeleton to aid the user in making group object
requests. We have evaluated the overheads incurred in maintaining
and accessing these complex object skeletons. We have found that the
performance of methods using our client-driven object approach improves
by 34% compared to the traditional object-on-demand access
approach. TP-1 benchmark was used in this study.