Cyclic Inheritance Detection for Object-Oriented Database

Inheritance is the main theme of schema design for the object-oriented software and object-oriented database. This notion supports the class hierarchy design and captures the is-a relationship between a class and its subclass. It contributes to good properties of modularity, reusability and incremental design Cox86][Meyer88]. self-inheritance. Unfortunately, for a class hierarchy with cyclic inheritance, to detect all the cyclic inheritances is a NP-complete problem. This paper describes a graph-theoretical reduction methodology to reduce them in a polynomial time. An algorithm to support this reduction is also presented. However, misuse of inheritance wil l lead to cyclic inheritance which suffers from redundant c I asses and endless