Developing an object-oriented view management system

This paper discusses our experiences regarding the design and implementation of the Multi View system - a framework for the specification, creation, and management of updatable views in object-oriented databases (OODBs) - using commercially available OODB technology. Multi View, which simplifies view schema design and maintenance by breaking view specification into the tasks of class derivation, global schema integration, view class selection, and view hierarchy generation, has been implemented on top of the GemStone OODB. The current implementation employs a three-layered architecture (composed of meta-objects, schema-objects, and data-objects) to extend the GemStone object model. It results in a view tool that extends the GemStone data model by supporting view specification, maintenance, and access. In this paper, we describe the system classes and methods as well as necessary algorithms. The first prototype of Multi View has been built, and we describe a sample application example.