Relating Distributed Objects

Many relational and object-oriented database systems provide referential integrity and compotmd operations on related objects using relationship mechanisms. Distributed object systems are emerging to support applications that access objects across distributed, heterogeneous system boundaries. Because the fundamental assump tions of distributed, heterogeneous, federated computing systems differ from database systems, supporting object relationships in such an environment requims different approaches to the representation and manipulation of relationships than those traditionally used in database systems. This paper describes the Relationship Service for SunSoft’s Distributed Object Environment (DGE). We describe the fundamental assumptions of distributed object systems and motivate our design in that wntext.