Object–Oriented Views: Virtues and Limitations

Object–oriented views are important mechanisms that not only provide logical data independence, data hiding and security, but also are means of data integration, and simulating schema changes. Although several approaches to object–oriented views were proposed in scientific publications only a few commercial object– oriented databases support them. These approaches differ in functionality offered by views. In this paper we present an overview of different approaches to object– oriented views and compare them with regard to their basic features that comprise: view definition, integration and consistency, updateability through views, support for data hiding and security, and materialisation.