Abstract

The facility of schema evolution is necessary in object-oriented database applications. There exist several versions of schema and instances created under different versions of the schema concurrently in the database. This base proposes a mechanism for supporting accessing instances regardless of versions of the schema in schema evolution environments in object oriented databases. There is trade-off between the flexibility of schema modification operations and the system overhead for supporting such schema modifications. Access handling routines are provided to the undefined attributes in each version of the class. Access handling routines are also defined for each pair of semantics rather than defining backdate/update functions for each pair of versions of a class. Thus, this mechanism supports the change of semantics with reduced user and system overhead.

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