A Design Environment for Migrating Relational to Object Oriented Database Systems

Object-oriented technology has become mature enough to satisfy many new requirements coming from areas like computer-aided design (CAD), computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), or software engineering (SE). However, a competetive information management infrastructure often demands to merge data from CAD-, CIM-, or SE-systems with business data stored in a relational system. In addition, complex dependencies between those data stored in the different systems might exist and should be maintained. One approach for seamless integration of object-oriented and relational systems is to migrate the data (and the corresponding schema) from a relational to an object-oriented system. In this paper we describe an integrated design environment that supports the migration process and overcomes major drawbacks of comparable approaches.