An Object-Oriented Approach to Data Management: Why Design Databases Need It

Abstract

An object-oriented approach to management of engineering design data requires object persistence, object-specific rules for concurrency control and recovery, views, complex objects and derived data, and specialized treatment of operations, constraints, relationships and type descriptions. We discuss object-orientation as more than an implementation paradigm, and show how an object-oriented approach simplifies both use and implementation of engineering design systems.