A CASE tool to design distributed object oriented databases

As part of our work concerning multimedia distributed applications, we have been led to develop a method and a CASE (computer aided software engineering) tool to design distributed object-oriented databases (OODBs). Firstly, we defined a top-down design method that allows us to build local conceptual schemata from a global conceptual schema. The originality of our work consists in dissociating the static aspects and the dynamic aspects that are intrinsically linked in the objects. At the logical level, the fragmentation step we propose deals only with the static schema classes and permits us to define mixed-class fragments. In order to facilitate the designer's task, we propose a CASE tool dedicated to distributed OODB design. This tool presents the advantage of being guided by the design process. It integrates various kinds of rules and constraints that are related to distributed OODB design. These rules and constraints ensure the syntactic and semantic integrity of the designer's work.