An efficient method lookup technique for secondary storage object-oriented systems

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in developing object-oriented database management systems (DBMSs) to manage the large amount of data involved in applications such as computer-aided design, office automation, and software engineering. Several object-oriented data models have been proposed for the development of these DBMSs. A general approach to the implementation of these data models is to extend and utilize the techniques used in the implementation of object-oriented programming languages such as Smalltalk. One of the principal problems that cannot be solved using this approach is the development of efficient techniques for looking up methods, which are implementations of the interfaces of objects. Method lookup techniques used in object-oriented programming languages have been designed for real-memory implementations. When these techniques are applied to an environment that stores objects in secondary storage, they may require many accesses to secondary storage. A new technique is presented that requires only one access to secondary storage to retrieve a method.