Cyclic inheritance detection for object-oriented database

Inheritance is the main theme of schema design for the object-oriented software and object-oriented database. Misuse of inheritance will lead to cyclic inheritance which suffers from redundant classes and endless self-inheritance. For a class hierarchy with cyclic inheritance, to detect all the cyclic inheritances is a NP-complete problem. A graph-theoretical reduction methodology to reduce them in polynomial time is described. An algorithm to support this reduction is presented