Implementing relational operations in an object-oriented database

Abstract

This thesis expands the concepts of relational/object-oriented database systems. There are two different approaches to combining relational and object-oriented databases. This thesis takes the approach of adding relational operations to an object-oriented database rather than building an object-oriented layer on top of an existing relational database. The system proposed in this thesis was developed in the object-oriented programming language Prograph. It was chosen because it contains primitive operations for reading and writing database files to secondary storage and for manipulating complex data types (e.g., sounds and pictures). This thesis demonstrates that the foundation of current systems can be remedied and that the relational/object oriented database management system is indeed a feasible solution.