Event Specification in an Active Object-Oriented Database

Narain H. Gehani, H. V. Jagadish, Oded Shmueli

Abstract: The concept of a trigger is central to any active database. Upon the occurrence of a trigger event, the trigger is “fired”, i.e, the trigger action is executed. We describe a model and a language for specifying basic and composite trigger events in the context of an object-oriented database. The specified events can be detected efficiently using finite automata. We integrate our model with O++, the database programming language for the ode object database being developed at AT&T Bell Labs. We propose a new Event-Action model, which folds into the event specification the condition part of the well-known Event-Condition-Action model and avoids the multiple coupling modes between the event, condition, and action trigger components.