Alternatives in complex object representation: a performance perspective

With database systems finding wider use in CAD, office information systems, and logic programming applications, the importance of efficiently representing and manipulating complex objects is growing. In this study a classification of the alternatives for representing complex objects is examined. Consideration is given to the performance aspects of one representation technique based on object identifiers. It is shown that clustering of subobjects with their referencing objects is rarely a good idea. In contrast, it is shown that caching the intermediate results of query processing can yield large benefits