Integrating an object-oriented programming system with a database system

There are two major issues to address to achieve integration of an object-oriented programming system with a database system. One is the language issue: an object-oriented programming language must be augmented with semantic data modeling concepts to provide a robust set of data modeling concepts to allow modeling of entities for important real-world applications. Another is the computational-model issue: application programmers should be able to access and manipulate objects as though the objects are in an infinite virtual memory; in other words, they should not have to be aware of the existence of a database system in their computations with the data structures the programming language allows. This paper discusses these issues and presents the solutions which we have incorporated into the ORION object-oriented database system at MCC.