Migration in Object-Oriented Database Systems - A Practical Approach*

Object-oriented database systems are designed to meet the requirements of advanced database applications such as computer-integrated manufacturing. These requirements may evolve in the course of time and may require the migration of the database application from one object-oriented database system to another. Traditional migration approaches for relational database systems fail when applied to object-oriented database systems. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap. The paper describes a framework for the migration of object-oriented database applications. Our approach is based on a detailed analysis of the involved database systems, of the application’s database requirements, and of the resources available for the database migration. We illustrate our framework by means of a case study, which is migrating an electronic planning board system from the object-oriented database system ONTOS to ObjectStore.