Abstract

Generic Model Management -- A Database Infrastructure for Schema Manipulation

Despite 30 years of research on database support for engineering applications, such applications remain complicated and hard to build. To improve this situation by an order of magnitude, a much higher level API is needed. We present such an interface, called Model Management. Its objects are models and mappings. By "model," we mean a complex structure that represents a design artifact, such as a relational schema, XML schema, object-oriented interface, UML model, web-site map,or software configuration. By "mapping," we mean an explicit representation of connections or transformations between two models. The main operations of Model Management are match, merge, diff, and compose. We explain how these operations can be used to solve classical meta data management problems and sketch a system architecture to implement them.

Biography

Phil Bernstein is a researcher at Microsoft Corporation. Over the past 25 years, he has been a product architect at Microsoft and at Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. During that time, he has published over 100 articles on the theory and implementation of database systems, and coauthored three books, the latest of which is "Principles of Transaction Processing for the System Professional" (Morgan Kaufmann, 1997). He holds a B.S. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from University of Toronto. A summary of his current research on meta data management can be found at http://www.research.microsoft.com/~philbe.

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