Lehrgebiet Informationssysteme

FB Informatik

LG IS

AG DBIS

(C) AG DBIS

Using the STEP Standard and Databases in Science

Udo Nink

University of Kaiserslautern
P.O. Box 3049, 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
e-mail: nink@informatik.uni-kl.de

Paper as gzipped PostScript

Abstract

Database management systems (DBMS) have to provide certain facilities meeting the requirements of scientific and statistical database management. Reviewing problems and promises for current database technology, the STEP standard is assessed for selected aspects of data management, data access, data exchange, and data modeling. STEP-based solutions are proposed for concrete examples of SSDBM especially in the context of the scientific data exchange standard FITS. We introduce and discuss EXPRESS, the modeling language of STEP, and SDAI, the corresponding data access interface. The performance of navigational access provided by SDAI is considered a crucial aspect. Exploiting the code generation mechanism used to instantiate SDAI for a given programming language - we call it a generated call interface - an adequate software architecture on top of an ODBMS as well as STEP-specific optimizations are proposed.

Keywords

application programming interface, data access, data exchange, data modeling, generated call interface, EXPRESS, FITS, SDAI, STEP, ODBMS

published in Proc. 9th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, August 1997, Olympia, Washington