Managing Inheritance Hierarchies in Object/Relational Mapping Tools

We study, in the context of object/relational mapping tools, the problem of describing mappings between inheritance hierarchies and relational schemas. To this end, we introduce a novel mapping model, called M2 ORM2 +HIE, and investigate its mapping capabilities. We first show that M2 ORM2 +HIE subsumes three well-know basic representation strategies for mapping a hierarchy to relations. We then show that M2 ORM2 +HIE also allows expressing further mappings, e.g., where the three basic strategies are applied independently to different parts of a multi-level hierarchy. We describe the semantics of M2 ORM2 +HIE in term of how CRUD (i.e., Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on objects (in a hierarchy) can be translated into operations over a corresponding relational database. We also investigate correctness conditions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CAISE
• Authors: Luca Cabibbo, Antonio Carosi
• Keywords: CAISE 2005, Mapping Capabilities, Object/relational Mapping, Well-know Basic Representation