Object Management for a Visual Data Analysis Tool

This paper reports the advantages and disadvantages in applying an ODBMS (Object-oriented database management system) and an ORDBMS (Object relational database management system) to INFOVISER's object management scheme, a visual data analysis tool that we have been researching and developing. This paper also surveys a DBMS called LiteObject, which solves the main problems found in existing DBMSs, such as the complexity of implementing a versioning procedure and performance problems in loading a large number of instances. LiteObject offers version management based on constraints that exclude check in/out procedures from the application source code which decreases the degree of complexity. In addition, LiteObject offers a bulk loading interface to applications and manages several instances in one container. This reduces the amount of processing by removing identical steps in the process of inserting instances and adding instances to a collection type attribute. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.