Won Kim, Hong-Tai Chou. Versions of Schema for Object-Oriented Databases. In François Bancilhon, David J. DeWitt, editors, Fourteenth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, August 29 - September 1, 1988, Los Angeles, California, USA, Proceedings. pages 148-159, Morgan Kaufmann, 1988. [doi]
Version control is one of the important database requirements for design environments. Various models of ver- sions have been proposed and implemented. However, research in versions has been focused exclusively on versioning single design objects. In a multi-user design environment where the schema (definition) of the design objects may undergo dynamic changes, it is important to be able to version the schema, as well as version the single design objects. In this paper, we propose a model of versions of schema by extending our model of versions of single objects. In particular, we present the semantics of our model of versions of schema for object-oriented databases, explore issues in implementing the model, and examine a few alternatives to our model of versions of schema.