Abstract
Object-oriented databases (OODBs) canbe used for many non-traditional database application areas such as computer-aided design, etc. Usually those application areas require advanced modeling power for expressing complicated relationships among data sets. OODBs have more distinguished features than the traditional relational database systems. One of the distinguished characteristics of OODBs is class hierarchy (also called inheritance hierarchy). A class hierarchy in an OODB means that a class can hand down the definitions of the class to the subclass of the class. In other words, a class is allowed to inherit the definitions of the class from the superclass. In this paper, we present performance evaluation metrics for class hierarchy in OODBs from a concurrency control perspective. The proposed performance metrics are developed to determine which concurrency control scheme in OODBs can be used for a given class hierarchy. In this study, in order to develop performance metrics, we use class hierarchy structure (both of single inheritance and multiple inheritance), and data access frequency for each class. The proposed performance metrics will be also used to compare performance evaluation for various concurrency control techniques.
