Applications of Object Oriented Technology to the Integration of Heterogeneous Database Systems

The object-oriented paradigm has several features that facilitate the integration of heterogeneous data management systems. One of the main problems in the integration is to provide users with the same data model and language to access very different systems. This problem exists in all kinds of distributed heterogeneous data management systems, independently from their integration architecture (like classical distributed databases, federated databases, multidatabases). This paper shows that the use of an object-oriented data model for building a "uniform" view of several databases can greatly simplify this task, and actually extends the scope of integration towards two directions. The first concerns the integration of data management systems to which traditional integration techniques, based on mappings among data models, cannot be applied. The second direction moves the goal of integration to re-using not only data but to re-using data and application software using these data. In the paper we also briefly discuss some requirements for an object-oriented integrated platform.