Value based identification and functional dependencies for object databases

Object identification by abstract identifiers should be considered as a modeling and not as a database concept. This means that object identifiers are not appropriate for the access to specific objects using a database language. In this paper, we discuss how the relational concept of a functional dependency can be adapted to object databases in order to get more convenient ways of fetching objects. Object functional dependencies are proposed allowing the determination of value-based identification criteria. For these constraints, different definitions of satisfiability are given based on a so-called validation relation. These definitions are related to different forms of identification.