Generic Components in Object-Relational Database Systems

Modularizing programs and developing systems in a component-based way is state-ofthe art in application development. Object-relational database management systems (ORDBMS) are not supporting these concepts appropriately. We present our approach bringing these concepts into the object-relational schema design. Genericity is another concept to foster reuse, widely used in application development. An ORDBMS can by seen as powerful generic component, parameterizable at schema creation time and, to some degree, at run time (by the so-called schema evolution). Nevertheless, using genericity on top of this generic system to parameterize schema components is a promising way to develop more general schema components and thereby increase the opportunities to reuse them. Finally, we enhance our approach to support generic schema components.