Object signatures for supporting efficient navigation in object-oriented databases

Most methods that have been proposed to improve query processing in object-oriented databases are designed for the aggregation hierarchy. Although the structure of the generalization hierarchy is similar to the aggregation hierarchy, techniques developed for the aggregation hierarchy cannot fully use the characteristics of the generalization hierarchy to improve performance. We devise a new object signature for the generalization hierarchy. The object signature consists of two parts: a reference signature and a structure signature. The former can be used to eliminate objects that do not match the nested predicates specified in the query, and the latter can be used to eliminate objects that do not belong to the target classes. We propose some processing methods using the object signatures for queries that involve generalization hierarchies. In addition, we define cost models of the object signature and then compare the performance of the traditional query processing method with the object signature method. The results show that using the object signatures can effectively reduce the number of disk accesses in a query.