The Impact of Run-Time Schema Interpretation in a Network Data Model DBMS

This paper describes a simulation study of the effect of runtime schema interpretation in a network data model database management system. To perform database operations, programmers use a data manipulation language which supports calls to the data manipulation routines. The data manipulation routines utilize database descriptors from the schema to determine which operations on the database are to be performed for a given actual parameter to the procedure. Current database systems perform the binding of schema descriptors in the data manipulation routines at run-time by interpretation. A niumber of researchers are studying methods to precompute the information required to determine the correct function to execute rather than using run-time interpretation.