Treffer: Physical database design for an object-oriented database system

Object-oriented database systems typically offer a variety of structuring capabilities to model complex objects. This flexibility, together with type (or class) hierarchies and computed "attributes"§ (methods), poses a high demand on the physical design of object-oriented databases. Similar to traditional databases, it is hardly ever true that the conceptual structure of the database is also a good, that is, effcient, internal one. Rather, data representing the conceptual objects may be structured completely different, for performance reasons. Database systems providing a reasonable amount of data independence allow a physical design that differs from the logical structure significantly. Hence, the performance of the system can be tailored to the overall transaction load faced. The paper presents choices for physical designs that make use of a complex storage model, an extended nested relational model. A first prototype of a physical design optimizer is also presented. ; published