This page shows all publications that appeared in the IASI annual research reports. Authors currently affiliated with the Institute are always listed with the full name.

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Show all publications of the year  1994, with author Formica A., in the category IASI Research Reports (or show them all):

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IASI Research Report n. 384    

Anna Formica, Michele Missikoff

Correctness of inheritance hierarchies in recursive object-oriented database schemas

ABSTRACT

Database design is traditionally recognized as one of the difficult activities in developing database applications. With the advent of Object-Oriented database (OODBs), and their rich underlying data model, the problem becomes even harder. In particular, in designing an OODB schema, the presence of inheritance hierarchies, with multiple supertypes and the possibility of inheritance conflicts, can lead to incorrect schema definitions. In this paper, we adress the problem of the characterization of a correct inheritance hirarchy, within the widely accepted fram of Cardelli's type theory. The analysis is extended to recursive OODB schemas, showing that such a theory fails to deal correctly with all possible cases. It results that, in presence of recursive record types, the problem of certifying the correctness is, in general, undecidable. Therefore, we introduce the notion of fully certifiable schemas, supplying a formal characterization of the schemas for which correctness is decidable.