Analysis and Design for Active Databases

Active databases have been promoted as a viable way to solve the problems of many nontraditional database applications. While there are several proposals for mechanisms to support active database features, analysis and design have been largely ignored. As a remedy, we propose Object-oriented Systems Modeling (OSM) for active database analysis and design. OSM, which is not an extension or retrofit of an existing system, is a new model that has been designed from scratch to meet the unique requirements of active database systems. It is highly expressive and maps conveniently to the real-world, and its formally defined syntax and semantics establish a sound basis both for prototype analysis model execution and for design transformations that lead to efficient implementations.