TR030: Outer Joins and Filters for Instantiating Objects from Relational Databases through Views

One of the approaches for integrating an object-oriented programs with databases is to instantiate objects from relational databases by evaluating view queries. In that approach, it is often necessary to evaluate some joins of the query by left outer joins to prevent information loss caused by the tuples discarded by inner joins. It is also necessary to filter some relations with selection conditions to prevent the retrieval of unwanted nulls.

The system should automatically prescribe joins as inner or left outer joins and generate the filters, rather than letting it be specified manually for every view definition. We develop such a mechanism in this paper. To overcome the heterogeneity of an object-oriented model and the relational model, we first develop a rigorous system model. The system model provides a well-defined context for developing a simple mechanism.

The mechanism requires only one piece of information from users: null options on an object attribute. The semantics of these options are mapped to referential integrity constraints on the query result. Then the system prescribes joins and generates filters accordingly. We also address reducing the number of left outer joins and the filters so that the query can be processed more efficiently.