Transforming Conceptual Models to Object-Oriented Database Designs: Practicalities, Properties, and Peculiarities

More work is needed on devising practical, but theoretically wellfounded procedures for doing object-oriented database (OODB) &sign. Besides being practical and having formal properties, these design procedures should alSo be flexible enough to allow for peculiarities that make applications unique. In this paper. we present and discuss an OODB design procedure that addresses these problems. The procedure we discuss is practical in the sense that it is based on a common family of conceptual models and in the sense that it does not expect users to supply esoteric, difficult-to-discover, and hard-to-understand constraints (such as multivalued dependencies), nor does it make hard-tocheck and easy-toovchok assumptions (such as the universal relation assumption). At the same time, the pocedure is well-founded and formal, beiig based on a new theoretical result that characterizes properties of interest in designing complex objects. It is also flexible and adaptable to the peculiarities of a wide variety of applications.