Migration in object‐oriented database systems—A practical approach

Abstract

Object‐oriented database systems are designed to meet the requirements of advanced database applications such as computer‐integrated manufacturing. These requirements may evolve in the course of time and may require the migration of the database application from one object‐oriented database system to another. Traditional migration approaches for relational database systems fail when applied to object‐oriented database systems. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap. The paper describes a framework for the migration of object‐oriented database applications. Our approach is based on a detailed analysis of the involved database systems, of the application's database requirements, and of the resources available for the database migration. We illustrate our framework by means of a case study, which is migrating an electronic planning board system from the object‐oriented database system ONTOS to ObjectStore.