Extending relational database technology for new applications
by J. M. Cheng, N. M. Mattos, D. D. Chamberlin, and L. G. DeMichiel
Relational database systems have been very successful in meeting
the needs of today's commercial applications. However, emerging
applications in disciplines such as engineering design are now
generating new requirements for database functionality and performance.
This paper describes a set of extensions to relational database
technology, designed to meet the requirements of the new generation of
applications. These extensions include a rich and extensible type
subsystem that is tightly integrated into the Structured Query Language
(SQL), a rules subsystem to enforce global database semantics, and a
variety of performance enhancements. Many of the extensions described
here have been prototyped at the IBM Database Technology Institute and
in research projects at the IBM Almaden Research Center in order
to demonstrate their feasibility and to validate their design.
Furthermore, many of these extensions are now under consideration as
part of the evolving American National Standards Institute/International
Organization for Standardization (ANSI/ISO) standard for the SQL
database language.
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