Automatic identification of semantic integrity constraints in object-oriented databases

The authors present an approach to automatically acquire semantic integrity constraints (SICs) based on queries previously processed in an object-oriented database environment. The automatic scheme acquires dynamic SICs from a history of queries and their previously processed answers. The proposed acquisition approach serves as an interactive tool for specifying SICs. Furthermore, even though the acquired constraints do not carry the application semantics and only reflect the snapshot state of the database, they can still be used in applications such as semantic query optimization so that a larger class of queries may be semantically optimized. The proposed approach exploits many distinct object-oriented features