Design and specification of an object-oriented data manipulation language

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to develop the design and specifications of an Object-Oriented Data Manipulation Language (O-ODML) for an Object-Oriented Data Model Language (O-ODM) constructed to test and demonstrate the Multimodel and Multilingual Database System at the Naval Postgraduate School Laboratory for Database Systems Research, Monterey California. New database applications, such as images and graphics databases, scientific databases, engineering design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM and CIM), require complex objects capable of storing images or large textual items and defining nonstandard application-specific operations. Traditional data models/languages were designed for record keeping, inventory control, product assemblies and inference making. In these traditional models, information about such complex objects is often scattered over many relations or records, leading to a loss of direct correspondence between a real-world object and its database representation. (Ref. 8) This thesis developed an O-ODML to include such features as object creation and destruction, search and retrieve queries, attribute-set operations, input/output operations and covering relationships. For compilation, the thesis includes the detailed specifications of the grammar, production rules, syntax, and symbols for the O-ODML. Thus the 0-ODML and O-ODM incorporate the ability to construct data structures that maintain the functional persistence of data, to specify intrinsic methods for manipulating data and to create objects with both ordinary attributes as well as sub-objects of sets that are independent of the original object.