A persistent class store for Choices

There has been much work undertaken on persistent stores in recent years, some of which has been in general object stores. One of the latter stores exists currently in the Choices operating system. This store permits persistent storage containers to be created and persistent objects to be inserted into these containers. In addition security and garbage collection facilities are provided. The paper illustrates an approach being undertaken to augment the Choices persistent storage mechanisms by implementing separate class stores for persistent objects using many of the basic mechanisms provided by the Choices persistent store, but permitting multiple persistent stores to coexist with objects containing references between stores. In addition it incorporates many of the database ideas for optimising the accesses by clustering the data using the locality of the data in the backing store, and providing support for a query language facility. Currently the design only includes a single store however the extension of this store to a distributed persistent store is discussed