A database implementation for large frame-based systems

A major requirement of database systems in engineering design and manufacturing applications is support for storage and maintenance of complex objects. Frame-based systems are capable of modeling complex objects. However, many of these systems are implemented in main memory. As the number of objects to be sorted far exceeds the capacity of the main memory of a computer, such an implementation is often unusable. An implementation of a frame-based system on top of the POSTGRES extensible database system is presented. Such an implementation combines the advantages of database management and frame-based systems and allows for the development of large engineering applications with minimal effort