The underlying assumption is that objects will be frequently inserted and updated. Object warehouses are designed to support the analysis of large collections of objects. The underlying assumption is that the data is read often and occasionally appended or updated. In some broad sense, object-oriented databases are shaped by issues related to transactions and referential integrity while object warehouses are shaped by issues related to performance and indexing. Recently, object warehouses have grown in importance with the rise of data mining.
Data mining is the automatic discovery of patterns, associations and anomalies in data.
Object warehouses provide a convenient foundation for data mining, especially the mining of complex data or data with complex relationships. In this paper, we describe our initial design and implementation for a preprocessor to Java called JTool which extends the Java language to support the creation and access of object warehouses. This is based upon our previous work on a low overhead, high performance persistent object manager we developed called PTool which was primarily used to create object warehouses. JTool trades some of the simplicity and performance of PTool for the saftey, portability and security of Java. We begin by examining how PTool currently creates object warehouses.