COMan — coexistence of object-oriented and relational technology

Applying object-oriented technology to systems development is widely recognized as improving productivity and reducing system maintenance costs. At the same time, relational technology has gained leverage in most businesses. There exist already several proposals to combine object-oriented programming with relational database systems. Yet, existing approaches do not support necessary combinations of object-oriented and relational technology in concert, like reengineering of existing relational data in an object-oriented way, and adding persistence to existing object-oriented applications. COMan (Complex Object Manager) has been developed to fill this gap. The kernel architecture of COMan is based on a set of tables, called meta database, which supports the flexible mapping from a set of object classes to a relational schema and vice versa. Thus, COMan provides necessary infrastructure technology for business reengineering seeking important leverage of legacy databases.