An object and XML database schemas design tool

Abstract

Nowadays relational database schemas are designed by using well-known database design techniques such as the entity relationship model and the normalization process. The result schemas can be guaranteed to have minimum redundancies if the fifth normal form (5NF) is achieved. However, in more recent database schema design such as the design of object database schema, the concern about minimum redundancies does not seem to be an important issue. Functional dependencies may still appear in an object class of the class diagram thus introduce update anomalies. This article first presents the use of NIAM, a well-established conceptual schema model, as a conceptual model for the design of object databases. A transformation from a NIAM to an OODB schema with minimum redundancy is presented. The conceptual schema can also be transformed into Extensible Markup Language (XML) which is originally a language for document management. However, it now gains popularity in database representation. It is particularly useful as a data format when an application must communicate with another application. This article also presents the NIAM conceptual schema model as a conceptual design tool for XML schema. A software tool that allows users to create NIAM schemas and generate object and XML schemas is developed.