A design environment for migrating relational to object oriented database systems

Object-oriented technology has become mature enough to satisfy many new requirements coming from areas like computer-aided design (CAD), computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) or software engineering (SE). However, a competitive information management infrastructure often demands the merging of data from CAD, CIM or SE systems with business data stored in a relational system. In addition, complex dependencies between those data stored in the different systems might exist and should be maintained. One approach for seamless integration of object-oriented and relational systems is to migrate the data (and the corresponding schema) from a relational to an object-oriented system. In this paper, we describe an integrated design environment that supports the migration process and overcomes the major drawbacks of comparable approaches.