An Approach to Deriving Object Hierarchies from Database Schema and Contents

Database design involves a set of activities, which include requirements analysis, conceptual database design, selection of a database management system, mapping from conceptual model to physical model, and the physical database design. Two problems that often confuse database designers in the conceptual database design phase are: (1) how to construct object hierarchies, and (2) how to specify object hierarchies. In this paper, we propose an adaptive approach utilizing a schema evolution process to address these two problems. The approach provides a set of heuristics to analyze the database schema as well as the database contents to provide substantial information to database designers for constructing and specifying object hierarchies.