A Novel Approach for Converting Relational Database to an Object Oriented Database: Data Migration and Performanace Analysis

The object-oriented data model is predicted to be the heart of the next generation of database systems. Users want to move from old legacy databases into applying this new technology that provides extensibility and exibility in maintenance. However, a major limitation on the wide acceptance of object-oriented databases is the amount of time and money invested on existing database applications, which are based on conventional legacy systems. Users do not want to lose the huge amounts of data present in conventional databases. This paper presents a novel approach to transform a given conventional database into an object-oriented database. It is assumed that the necessary characteristics of the conventional database to be re-engineered are known and available. The source of these characteristics might be the data dictionary and/or an expert in the given conventional database. We implemented a system that builds an understanding of a given conventional database by taking these characteristics as input and produces the corresponding object-oriented database as output. Finally, we handle the migration of data from the conventional database to the constructed object-oriented database.