PESTO: An Integrated Query/Browser for Object Databases

        This paper describes the design and implementation of PESTO (Portable Explorer of STructured Objects), an integrated user interface that supports browsing and querying of object databases. Like other object browsers, PESTO allows users to navigate in a hypertext-like fashion, following the relationships that exist among objects. In addition, PESTO allows users to formulate object queries through a unique, integraed query paradigm that presents querying as a natural extension of browsing; we call this paradigm query-in-place. PESTO's query facilities are quite powerful, including support for basic query operations such as simple selections, value-based joins, universal quantification, negation, and complex predicates, as well as object-oriented queries including path predicates (implicit joins), queries over nested sets, filtered sets, and method invocation. PESTO can be ported with relative ease to any object-oriented database system supporting a high-level query language, and its implementation is extensible in the sense that PESTO provides hooks that allow specialized predicate formation and display tools to be added to the system for important new data types (e.g., images or text).

By: Michael Carey, Laura Haas, John Williams and Vivekananda Maganty (Univ. of WI-Madison)

Published in: RJ10016 in 1996

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