Cactis: a self-adaptive, concurrent implementation of an object-oriented database management system

Abstract

Cactis is an object-oriented, multiuser DBMS developed at the University of Colorado. The system supports functionally-defined data and uses techniques based on attributed graphs to optimize the maintenance of functionally-defined data. The implementation is self-adaptive in that the physical organization and the update algorithms dynamically change in order to reduce disk access. The system is also concurrent. At any given time there are some number of computations that must be performed to bring the database up to date; these computations are scheduled independently and are performed when the expected cost to do so is minimal. The DBMS runs in the Unix/C Sun workstation environment. Cactis is designed to support applications that require rich data modeling capabilities and the ability to specify functionally-defined data, but that also demand good performance. Specifically, Cactis is intended for use in the support of such applications as VLSI and PCB design, and software environments.