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The CCUBE Constraint Object-Oriented Database System

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Abstract

Constraints provide a flexible and uniform way to represent diverse data capturing spatio-temporal behavior, complex modeling requirements, partial and incomplete information etc, and have been used in a wide variety of application domains. Constraint databases have recently emerged to deeply integrate data captured by constraints in databases. This paper reports on the development of the first constraint object-oriented database system, CCUBE, and describes its specification, design and implementation. The CCUBE system is designed to be used for the implementation and optimization of high-level constraint object-oriented query languages as well as for directly building software systems requiring extensible use of constraint database features. The CCUBE data manipulation language, Constraint Comprehension Calculus, is an integration of a constraint calculus for extensible constraint domains within monoid comprehensions, which serve as an optimization-level language for object-oriented queries. The data model for the constraint calculus is based on constraint spatio-temporal (CST) objects that may hold spatial, temporal or constraint data, conceptually represented by constraints. New CST objects are constructed, manipulated and queried by means of the constraint calculus. The model for the monoid comprehensions, in turn, is based on the notion of monoids, which is a generalization of collection and aggregation types. The focal point of our work is achieving the right balance between the expressiveness, complexity and representation usefulness, without which the practical use of the system would not be possible. To that end, CCUBE constraint calculus guarantees polynomial time data complexity, and, furthermore, is tightly integrated with the monoid comprehensions to allow deeply interleaved global optimization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Information and Software Systems Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Alexander Brodsky, Victor E. Segal, Jia Chen & Pavel A. Exarkhopoulo

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  1. Alexander Brodsky
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  2. Victor E. Segal
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  3. Jia Chen
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  4. Pavel A. Exarkhopoulo
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Brodsky, A., Segal, V.E., Chen, J. et al. The CCUBE Constraint Object-Oriented Database System. Constraints 2, 245–277 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009743528682

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