Advanced Extensions of SERF Technology. The area of this project is object-oriented database systems. OODBs offer powerful and flexible modeling support to handle the needs of diverse application domains, including modeling constructs, such as classes, abstractions, inheritance, reuse, and behavioral modeling. One important issue for databases in general and for OODBs in particular is schema evolution, the modification of the schema and the associated application data during the lifetime of a database system. Most work in the literature focussed on the realization of schema evolution operations in the context of a particular data model or even OODB, such as, Objectstore, Gemstone, Ithasca, or O2.
Support is restricted to primitive evolution support only.
Our project extends this previous work now providing complex extensible evolution support, as well as transparency of executing such schema changes on a shared OODB while minimally impacting existing applications. Area References R. G. G. Cattell et al. Potential Related Projects. Object-Oriented Database Systems.