Database Design Language Incorporating Collection Types for Web Database Applications

As the most widely used data model, the relational data model has undergone extensions since it was first introduced. The motivation is mainly to increase the ability in capturing complex real world problems. The new era of Internet databases, which includes document meta-data repository and multi media databases have raised a need for more complex semantics of data modeling. Thus, the existing relational database design needs to be extended to capture more complex data structure. One of the data structures is represented by collection types in the attributes of an entity or relationship. With collection type, an attribute can be an atomic type, but also a non-atomic or complex type. The existence of collection type then has changed the whole design methods in relational databases. However, the relational model design has not captured the collection types. Thus, this paper proposes the new database design for the purpose.