Management of Data Model Evolution in Object-Oriented Database Systems

Object-oriented database systems are designed to meet the requirements of advanced database applications. These requirements may evolve in the course of time and must be managed consistently at all levels of abstraction of a database system the database level, the database schema level, and the data model level. Approaches to the management of changes at the database level and the database schema level have been investigated in the literature. Approaches to the management of changes at the data model level are still missing. In this paper we introduce a framework for handling evolution at the data model level based on database migration. Our approach consists of a detailed analysis of the involved database systems and the application’s database requirements. We illustrate our framework by means of migrating a production planning and control system from the objectoriented database system ONTOS to ObjectStore*.