A Horizontal Partition of the Object-Oriented Database for Efficient Clustering

The partitioning of related objects should be performed before clustering for an efficient access in object-oriented databases. In this paper, a horizontal partition of related objects in object-oriented databases is presented. All subclass nodes in a class inheritance hierarchy of a schema graph are shrunk to a class node in the graph that is called condensed schema graph because the aggregation hierarchy has more influence on the partition than the class inheritance hierarchy. A set function and an accessibility function are defined to find a maximal subset of related objects among the set of objects in a class. A set function maps a subset of the domain class objects to a subset of the range class objects. An accessibility function maps a subset of the objects of a class into a subset of the objects of the same class through a composition of set functions. The algorithm derived in this paper is to find the related objects of a condensed schema graph using accessibility functions and set functions. The existence of a maximal subset of the related objects in a class is proved to show the validity of the partition algorithm using the accessibility function.