Abstract

Object oriented database management systems (OODBMS) have enormous advantages in comparison to relational systems in modeling highly complex and dynamic application scenarios. Still they lack some flexibility which could help their promotion into widely spread industrial use. Especially engineering environments frequently require schema changes to handle evolving designs. The main contribution of this paper is twofold: Firstly, we give an overview on schema evolution mech- anisms describing the state of the art in research. Due to our best knowledge no such comprehensive overview has been published so far. Secondly,the study of a gen- eral application scenario led us to a list of requirements. We propose a general framework based on schema ver- sioning to meet those requirements.