COMPLEX OBJECTS AND THEIR USE IN DESIGN TRANSACTIONS.

Abstract

Relational databases are of increasing interest to the design community. However, most current implementations were developed to support data processing transactions, and require extensions to support engineering applications. Complex objects and conversational transactions are two extensions to System R that solve some problems: a complex object groups tuples from several relations into a single database entity, and a conversational transaction is used to implement a design transaction that may persist for an extended period of time, perhaps weeks. This paper discusses the implementation of these two extensions.