Adding methods to relational database constructs

An approach is described to realize a hypertext-like navigation over relational database management systems (DBMSs) by encapsulating query methods to relational database constructs (attribute-values, tuples, columns, and relations) and by invoking those query methods directly over user-selected data. In order to handle structured query language (SQL) queries as generic/polymorphic methods, the authors extended the ordinary SQL and introduced a mechanism to attach query methods dynamically to several kinds of relational database constructs. They present their prototype system, called SQL-Navigator, which currently runs on the NeXT Sybase relational DBMS