Evaluation Metrics for Class Hierarchy in Object-Oriented Databases: Concurrency Control Perspectives

Object-oriented databases (OODBs) have been adopted for managing non-standard applications such as computer-aided design (CAD), office document management and many multimedia applications. One of the major characteristics of OODBs is class hierarchy where a subclass is allowed to inherit the definitions defined on its superclasses. In this paper, I present the evaluation metrics for class hierarchy quality in OODBs. These metrics are developed to determine if a concurrency control scheme can achieve good performance or not on a given class hierarchy. I first discuss the existing concurrency control schemes for OODBs. Then I provide evaluation metrics based on structural information and access frequency information in class hierarchies. In order to discuss significance of the proposed performance metrics, an analytical model is developed. Analysis results show that the performance metrics are important factor in concurrency control performance. I consider both single inheritance and multiple inheritance. The proposed metrics can be used to provide guidelines on how to design class hierarchy of an OODB for maximizing the performance of concurrency control technique.