Object versioning in Ode

Abstract

In designing the versioning facility in Ode, a few but semantically sound and powerful concepts are introduced that allow implementation of a wide variety of paradigms. Some of the salient features of these versioning facilities are the following: (1) object versioning is orthogonal to type; (2) reference to an object can be bound statically to a specific version of the object or dynamically to whatever is its latest version; and (3) both temporal as well as derived-from relationships between versions of an object are maintained automatically. These facilities have been incorporated seamlessly into Ode's database programming language, O++. The new language constructs are powerful enough to make O++ a suitable platform for implementing a variety of versioning paradigms and application-specific systems.