Abstract

We argue for avoiding database reorganizations due to schema modification in object-oriented systems, since these are expensive operations and they conflict with reusing existing software components. We show that data independence, which is a neglected concept in object databases, helps to avoid reorganizations in case of capacity preserving and reducing schema transforma- tions. We informally present a couple of examples to illustrate the idea of a schema transfor- mation methodology that avoids database reorganization.