A Methodology for Application Design Using Active Database Technology.

Abstract : Even though there has been a fair amount of work done in the incorporation of active behavior into database systems, little research has addressed the conceptual, DBMS-independent representation of the active behavioral aspects of the applications. This report presents the work done in the introduction of active aspects of information systems at the conceptual schema level. ER is described, which is an extension of the ER model to express active database behavior in the form of events and rules. Also described is a language to accommodate the concepts of events and rules in the ER schema. A methodology is proposed for the design of active databases based on the ER model, as an extension for traditional database design methodology. With the extension, the data model mapping step includes the translation of active database behavior specified in the conceptual schema into triggers or event alerters written in the DBMSs DDL/DML. Finally, the implementation of a graphical tool is described, which can do the mapping from the ER model to the logical schema of the target database.