Hanna Kozankiewicz, Jacek Leszczyłowski,Jacek Płodzień, Kazimierz Subieta

Updateable Object Views

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Abstract

We present a new approach to updateable, object-oriented, virtual (non-materialized) database views. It is based on the stack-based approach (SBA) to object-oriented query languages, which assumes the description of semantics in the form of abstract implementation of query/programming language constructs. The semantics is expressed in terms of naming, scoping and binding. It involves an environmental stack - a basic mechanism of majority of programming languages. Novelty of our approach is that a view definer has the possibility to introduce into a view definition any information about intents of view updates. The information has the form of procedures, which dynamically overload generic view updating operation. This feature opens possibilities, which have not been even considered yet in other approaches. The approach is relevant not only to any kind of object-oriented and object-relational database management systems, but can also be used to constructing intelligent wrappers and mediators for federated databases, for Web and/or XML applications, and for applications based on an agent-oriented ontology infrastructure. In the report we present detailed description of our approach including all necessary information on the syntax, semantics, implementation and pragmatics of corresponding language constructs. We also present examples demonstrating the power of our approach.

Keywords : object-orientedness, query language, database, database view, view updating, stack-based approach