This paper discusses the role of an object-oriented database management system (DBMS) for engineering applications. It describes a new approach to the design of a DBMS using object-oriented programming written in C under UNIX.

Object-oriented programming has attracted considerable attention during the recent years, and the role of traditional database management systems--hierarchical, network, and relational--has been questioned by many experts.

Engineering applications and software projects require highly interconnected hierarchical data. The authors observe that such applications have fewer entities but many attributes and require a lot of data to be derived. Hence, this DBMS, called Cactis, attempts to support a variety of objects and allows attributes of objects to be derived from other data in the database.

The main feature of Cactis is the dynamic definition of a scheme, depending on the user’s requirements. Some of the system’s new features are functionally defined data and intelligent updated algorithms. The computations required to update the data are scheduled independently and are concurrent in nature.

The experts involved in the development of new DBMSs will benefit from the concepts and structure of Cactis. The authors developed this complex DBMS in an academic environment with the help of students. The initial results of Cactis’s performance are also discussed in the paper. The authors list the system’s limitations as well as its enhancements and therefore present a more meaningful picture of Cactis.