Bridging objects and relations: a mediator for an OO front-end to RDBMSs
An object-oriented paradigm is established as the leading approach for developing non-traditional applications, such as GIS or multimedia systems. On the other hand, relational databases have dominated the area of data processing in the past decade. These two trends motivate the research on integrating OO applications with relational databases. This paper presents our approach to the symbiosis of the OO and relational data models, which is built into GinisNT, a scalable OO GIS framework based on an OO-to-relational mapping algorithm. The mapping algorithm transforms classes and objects into relations and tuples, and vice versa, instantiates objects from relational databases. The methodology presented here is extremely efficient, as has been proved by a number of applications developed in GinisNT, and is at the same time cost efficient, as it builds upon existing platforms.
gis oo-to-relational mapping algorithm object-oriented model relational model