Tim@cis.upenn.edu (Tim Finin) (11/13/86)
DBIG Meeting 10:30 Friday November 14th 554 Moore School University of Pennsylvania DEVELOPMENT OF AN OBJECT-ORIENTED DBMS David Maier Oregon Graduate Center and Servio Logic Development Corp GemStone is an object-oriented database server developed by Servio Logic that supports a model of objects similar to that of Smalltalk. GemStone provides complex objects with sharing and identity, specification of behavioral aspects of objects, and an extensible data model. Those features came with the choice of Smalltalk as a starting point for the data model and its programming language, OPAL. However, Smalltalk is a single-user, memory-based system, and requires significant modifications to provide a multi-user, disk-based system with support for associative queries objects of arbitrary size. This presentation begins with a summary of the requirements for a database system to support applications such as CAD, office automation and knowledge bases. I next introduce the Smalltalk language and its data model, showing how they satisfy some of the requirements, and indicating which remain to be satisfied. I will outline the approach Servio took on the remaining requirements, describing the techniques used for storage management, concurrency, recovery, name spaces and associative access, as time permits.