Updates Through Views: A New Hope

Abstract

Database views are extensively used to represent unmaterialized tables. Applications rarely distinguish between a materialized base table and a virtual view, thus, they may issue update requests on the views. Since views are virtual, update requests on them need to be translated to updates on the base tables. Existing literature has shown the difficulty of translating view updates in a side-effect free manner. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach for separating the data instance into a logical and a physical level. This separation allows us to achieve side-effect free translations of any kind of update on the view. Furthermore, deletes on a view can be translated without affecting the base tables. We describe the implementation of the framework and present our experimental results