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Chapter 9: Object-Relational Databases
· Nested Relations
· Complex Types and Object Orientation
· Querying With Complex Types
· Creation of Complex Values and Objects
· Comparison of Object-Oriented and Object-Relational
Databases
Database Systems Concepts 9.1 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Object-Relational Data Models
· Extend the relational data model by including object orientation
and constructs to deal with added data types.
· Allow attributes of tuples to have complex types, including
non-atomic values such as nested relations.
· Preserve relational foundations, in particular the declarative
access to data, while extending modeling power.
· Upward compatibility with existing relational languages
Database Systems Concepts 9.2 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Nested Relations
· Motivation:
­ Permit non-atomic domains (atomic  indivisible)
­ Example of non-atomic domain: set of integers, or set of
tuples
­ Allows more intuitive modelling for applications with
complex data
· Intuitive definition:
­ allow relations wherever we allow atomic (scalar) values --
relations within relations
· Retains mathematical foundation of relational model
· Violates first normal form
Database Systems Concepts 9.3 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Example of a Nested Relation
· Example: document retrieval system
· Each document has
­ title,
­ a set of authors,
­ date acquired, and
­ a set of keywords
· Non-1NF document relation
title author-list date keyword-list
day month year
salesplan {Smith, Jones} 1 April 79 {profit, strategy}
status report {Jones, Frick} 17 June 85 {profit, personnel}
doc
Database Systems Concepts 9.4 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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1NF Version of Nested Relation
· 1NF version of doc
title author day month year keyword
salesplan Smith 1 April 79 profit
salesplan Jones 1 April 79 profit
salesplan Smith 1 April 79 strategy
salesplan Jones 1 April 79 strategy
status report Jones 17 June 85 profit
status report Frick 17 June 85 profit
status report Jones 17 June 85 personnel
status report Frick 17 June 85 personnel
flat-doc
Database Systems Concepts 9.5 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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4NF Decomposition of Nested Relation
· Remove awkwardness of flat-doc by assuming that the
following multivalued dependencies hold:
­ title  author
­ title  keyword
­ title  day month year
· Decompose flat-doc into 4NF using the schemas:
­ (title, author)
­ (title, keyword)
­ (title, day, month, year)
Database Systems Concepts 9.6 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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4NF Decomposition of flat - doc
title author
salesplan Smith
salesplan Jones
status report Jones
status report Frick
title keyword
salesplan profit
salesplan strategy
status report profit
status report personnel
title day month year
salesplan 1 April 89
status report 17 June 94
Database Systems Concepts 9.7 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Problems with the 4NF Schema
· 4NF design requires users to include joins in their queries.
· 1NF relational view flat-doc defined by join of 4NF relations:
­ eliminates the need for users to perform joins,
­ but loses the one-to-one correspondence between tuples
and documents.
· Nested relation representation is much more natural here
Database Systems Concepts 9.8 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Complex Types and Object Orientation
· Extensions to relational model include:
­ Nested relations
­ Complex types
­ Specialization (is-a hierarchies)
­ Inheritance
­ Object identity
· Will cover SQL extensions
­ SQL-3 standards currently (as of early 1997) being
developed
­ Our presentation is based loosely on an SQL-3 draft, the
XSQL language and the Illustra extensions to SQL
Database Systems Concepts 9.9 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Structured and Collection Types
Define new types and a new table
· create type MyString char varying.
· create type MyDate
(day integer,
month char(10),
year integer)
· create type Document
(name MyString,
author-list setof(MyString),
date MyDate,
keyword-list setof(MyString))
· create table doc of type Document
Database Systems Concepts 9.10 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Structured and Collection Types (Cont.)
· Unlike table definitions in ordinary relational databases, the
doc table definition allows attributes that are sets and
structured attributes like MyDate.
· Allows composite attributes and multivalued attributes of E-R
diagrams to be represented directly.
· The types created using the above statements are recorded in
the schema stored in the database.
· Can create tables directly.
create table doc
(name MyString,
author-list setof(MyString),
date MyDate,
keyword-list setof(MyString))
Database Systems Concepts 9.11 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Inheritance of Types
· Consider the following type definition for people.
create type Person
(name MyString,
social-security integer)
· Use inheritance to define student and teacher types.
create type Student
(degree MyString,
department MyString)
under Person
create type Teacher
(salary integer,
department MyString)
under Person
Database Systems Concepts 9.12 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Inheritance of Types (Cont.)
· To store information about teaching assistants and to avoid a
conflict between two occurrences of department, use an as
clause.
· Definition of the type TeachingAssistant.
create type TeachingAssistant
under Student with (department as student-dept),
Teacher with (department as teacher-dept)
Database Systems Concepts 9.13 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Inheritance at the Level of Tables
· Allows an object to have multiple types by allowing an entity to
exist in more than one table at once.
· people table: create table people
(name MyString,
social-security integer)
· Can then define the students and teachers tables as follows.
create table students
(degree MyString,
department MyString)
under people
create table teachers
(salary integer,
department MyString)
under people
Database Systems Concepts 9.14 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Table Inheritance: Roles
· Table inheritance is useful for modelling roles
­ permits an object to have multiple types, without having a
most-specific type (unlike type inheritance).
­ e.g., an object can be in the students and teachers
subtables simultaneously, without having to be in a subtable
student-teachers that is under both students and teachers
­ object can gain/lose roles: corresponds to inserting/deleting
object from a subtable
Database Systems Concepts 9.15 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Table Inheritance: Consistency Requirements
· Consistency requirements on subtables and supertables.
­ Each tuple of the supertable people can correspond to at
most one tuple of each of the tables students and teachers.
­ Each tuple in students and teachers must have exactly one
corresponding tuple in people.
· Inherited attributes other than the primary key of the
supertable need not be stored, and can be derived by means
of a join with the supertable, based on the primary key.
· As with types, multiple inheritance is possible.
Database Systems Concepts 9.16 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Reference Types
· Object-oriented languages provide the ability to create and
refer to objects.
· Redefine the author-list field of the type Document as:
author-list setof(ref(Person))
Now author-list is a set of references to Person objects
· Tuples of a table can also have references to them.
­ References to tuples of the table people have the type
ref(people).
­ Can be implemented using either primary keys or system
generated tuple identifiers.
Database Systems Concepts 9.17 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Relation Valued Attributes
· By allowing an expression evaluating to a relation to appear
anywhere a relation name may appear, our extended SQL can
take advantage of the structure of nested relations.
· Consider the following relation pdoc.
create table pdoc
name MyString,
author-list setof(ref(people)),
date MyDate,
keyword-list setof(MyString))
Database Systems Concepts 9.18 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Example Queries
· Find all documents which have the word "database" as one of
their keywords.
select name
from pdoc
where "database" in keyword-list
· Create a relation containing pairs of the form "document-name,
author-name" for each document and each author of the
document.
select B.name, Y.name
from pdoc as B, B.author-list as Y
· Find the name, and the number of authors for each document.
select name, count(author-list)
from pdoc
Database Systems Concepts 9.19 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Path Expressions
· The dot notation for referring to composite attributes can be
used with references.
· Consider the previous table people and a table phd-student.
create table phd-students
(advisor ref(people))
under people
· Find the names of the advisors of all Ph.D. students.
select students.advisor.name
from phd-students
· Find the names of all authors of documents in the pdoc
relation.
select Y.name
from pdoc.author-list as Y
Database Systems Concepts 9.20 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Unnesting
· Transformation of a nested relation into first normal form.
· Converts a nested relation into a single flat relation with no
nested relations or structured types as attributes.
· Unnest the doc relation (author-list and keyword-list are
nested relations; name and date are not nested).
select name, A as author, date.day, date.month, date.year,
K as keyword
from doc as B, B.author-list as A, B.keyword-list as K
· B in the from clause is declared to range over doc.
· A ranges over the authors in author-list for that document
· K is declared to range over the keywords in the keyword-list of
the document.
Database Systems Concepts 9.21 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Nesting
· Transforming a 1NF relation into a nested relation.
· Can be carried out by an extension of grouping in SQL.
· Nest the relation flat-doc on the attribute keyword:
select title, author, (day, month, year) as date,
set(keyword) as keyword-list
from flat-doc
groupby title, author, date
title author date keyword-list
(day, month, year)
salesplan Smith (1, April, 89) {profit, strategy}
salesplan Jones (1, April, 89) {profit, strategy}
status report Jones (17, June, 94) {profit, personnel}
status report Frick (17, June, 94) {profit, personnel}
Database Systems Concepts 9.22 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Functions
· Define a function that, given a document, returns the count of
the number of authors.
create function author-count(one-doc Document)
returns integer as
select count(author-list)
from one-doc
· Find the names of all documents that have more than one
author.
select name
from doc
where author-count(doc) > 1
Database Systems Concepts 9.23 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Functions (Cont.)
Database system may also allow the use of functions written in
other languages such as C or C++
· Benefits: more efficient for many operations, more expressive
power
· Drawbacks
­ code to implement function may need to be loaded into
database system
­ risk of accidental corruption of database structures
­ security risk
Database Systems Concepts 9.24 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Creation of Complex Values and Objects
· Create a tuple of the type defined by the doc relation
("salesplan", set("Smith", "Jones"), (1, "April", 89),
set("profit", "strategy"))
­ value for the composite attribute date is created by listing its
attributes day, month and year within parentheses.
­ set valued attributes author-list and keyword-list are
created by enumerating their elements within parentheses
following the keyword set.
Database Systems Concepts 9.25 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Example Queries
· Insert the above tuple into the relation doc.
insert into doc
values
("salesplan", set("Smith", "Jones"), (1, "April", 89),
set("profit", "strategy"))
· Can use complex values in queries. Find the names and dates
of all documents whose name is one of "salesplan",
"opportunities" or "risks".
select name, date
from doc
where name in set("salesplan", "opportunities", "risks")
Database Systems Concepts 9.26 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Additional Concepts
· Multiset values can be created by replacing set by multiset.
· Use constructor functions to create new objects.
­ constructor function for an object of type T is T()
­ creates a new uninitialized object of type T, fills in its
oid field, and returns the object
­ fields of the object must then be initialized
Database Systems Concepts 9.27 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997
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Comparison of O-O and O-R Databases
Summary of strengths of various database systems:
· Relational systems: simple data types, querying, high
protection.
· Persistent programming language based OODBs: complex
data types, integration with programming language, high
performance.
· Object-relational systems: complex data types, querying, high
protection.
Database Systems Concepts 9.28 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan c 1997