Tutorial

The New Object-Relational Generation and its Application in Web Databases
J. Wenny Rahayu, Eric Pardede
Department of Computer Science & Computer Engineering
La Trobe University
Bundoora, VIC 3086, Australia
Phone: +61 3 9479 1282
Fax: +61 3 9479 3060
Email: {W.Rahayu, E.Pardede}@latrobe.edu.au

David Taniar
Clayton School of Information Technology
Monash University
Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
Phone: +61 3 9905 9693
Fax: +61 3 9905 5159
Email: David.Taniar@infotech.monash.edu.au
Wenny RahayuEric PardedeDavid Taniar

Abstract

The popularity of Object-Oriented concepts, design, and programming has stimulated the need for a database system that enables a straightforward process to store and retrieve object instances. In building large enterprise applications, we need to be able to integrate all the above techniques and to avoid any mismatch between the design stage, programming, and database storage.

This talk is divided into two major parts. In the first part, we will describe the comprehensive and fundamental aspects of object-oriented data modelling and implementation in Oracle9i/10g Object-Relational DBMS. It covers the implementation of structural aspects of an object model, including object types, collection types, object referencing, nested tables, and inheritance structures, as well as the behavioural aspects including encapsulated member procedures and functions. This part of the talk sets down the foundation of the new era of database management system, whereby the powerful concepts of object-oriented paradigm and hierarchies are embedded within the database structures. This new notion of Object-Relational concept prevents us from the need to 'flatten' object structures when transforming Object-Oriented hierarchy into database implementation.

The second part of the talk focuses on recent application developments in the area of Object-Relational systems. In the last few years, Object-Relational Databases have been used not only for transactional database. Due to its popularity, many users utilize Object-Relational Database features in different domains. We will explore the following applications in this talk:

  • The usage of Object-Relational concept to store web-based eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data. The hierarchical nature of XML data requires a data structure that is able to capture and maintain its structure and the Object-Relational data model is a suitable for it.
  • The utilization of Object-Relational concept to build an Integrated Data Warehouse. Due to its ability to capture Object-Oriented as well as the XML data structures as mentioned above, on top of the conventional Relational model, we will demonstrate that the Object-Relational database is a suitable structure to integrate the three models.

The three presenters for this talk have published a book early this year entitled 'Object-Oriented Oracle' which contains most of the materials on Object-Relational databases to be presented this tutorial.

Duration:

2-3 hours.

Brief biography of the presenters

J. Wenny Rahayu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering LaTrobe University. Her PhD thesis in the area of Object-Relational Databases has been awarded the Best PhD Thesis 2001 by the Computer Science Association Australia. She has been lecturing at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering La Trobe University since 1995. In 2003, she was awarded the Dean's Award for excellence in teaching. Her research areas cover a wide range of advanced databases topics including Object-Relational Databases, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Web Databases, Bioinformatics Databases, Semantic Web and Ontology, Semantic Grid in Grid Computing, XML Databases and Data Warehousing. She is currently the Head of Data Engineering and Knowledge Management Laboratory at La Trobe University. To date, she has successfully supervised to completion 5 PhD and more than 10 Masters/Honours level students. She publishes extensively every year, including four books (one authored and three edited), and more than 80 research papers in international journals and proceedings. She has been invited for numerous talks in her research areas, and has been appointed as member of journal editorial board and invited to serve as publicity chair, program-co-chair, and program committee member in several international journals and conferences in the area of databases and web applications.

Eric Pardede is an Associate Lecturer at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is completing his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at La Trobe University under the supervision of Dr. Wenny Rahayu and Dr. David Taniar. From the same university he received his Master of Information Technology in 2002. He also holds a Master of Quality Management degrees from University of Wollongong and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Bandung Institute of Technology. He has published a book and several research papers appeared in international journals and conference proceedings. He is an active scholar that has chairing several international conferences and workshops. His current research area is in XML Database, Data Modeling and Query Optimization.

David Taniar holds Bachelors (Honours), Masters, and PhD degrees - all in Computer Science/Information Technology, with a particular speciality in Databases. He publishes extensively every year. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. He first joined Monash University in 1997 as a lecturer in the Gippsland School of Computing and Information Technology. After a short stay at the Department of Computer Science, RMIT University in 1999-2000, he joined the School of Business Systems at Clayton in the beginning of 2001 as a Senior Lecturer. He is a founding editor-in-chief of a number of international journals, including Intl J of Data Warehousing and Mining, Intl J of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, Mobile Information Systems, Journal of Mobile Multimedia, Intl J of Web Information Systems, and Intl J of Web and Grid Services. He is also an editorial board member of numerous international journals.