Inheritance and Persistence in Database Programming Languages

Summary: Argues for separating type, extent, and persistence in DB programming languages to derive inheritance from type hierarchies. Proposes a generic type to select all objects of a type, and analyzes object- and type-level inheritance with persistence in relational DBs. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2352
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1986
Pagerank: 6.9610816e-05
Overall Rank: 4,010 | 72.49%
DOI: 10.1145/16894.16858

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Peter Buneman (University of Pennsylvania)
2. Malcolm Atkinson (University of Glasgow)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{buneman_sigmod86,
        title = {{Inheritance and Persistence in Database Programming Languages}},
        author = {Buneman, Peter and Atkinson, Malcolm},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '86},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/16894.16858},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/16894.16858},
        year = {1986}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,662	ODE (Object Database and Environment): The Language and the Data Model	1989	SIGMOD	0.00010075123
3,083	C-Logic of Complex Objects	1989	PODS	7.7717632e-05
4,342	Modeling Class Hierarchies with Contradictions	1988	SIGMOD	6.7537389e-05
13,165	Rapid Application Prototyping: The PROQUEL Language	1988	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
15	The Functional Data Model and the Data Language DAPLEX	1979	SIGMOD	0.00061144858
139	A Language Facility for Designing Interactive Database-Intensive Applications	1978	SIGMOD	0.00029742792
147	Making Smalltalk a Database System	1984	SIGMOD	0.00029474235
247	Some High-level Language Constructs for Data of Type Relation	1977	SIGMOD	0.00023302214
421	The Format Model: A Theory of Database Organization (extended abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00018742219
475	A Calculus for Complex Objects	1986	PODS	0.00017864549
613	Database Relations with Null Values (Extended Abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00015723523
1,449	Storage and Access Structures to Support a Semantic Data Model	1982	VLDB	0.00010749899

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,342	Modeling Class Hierarchies with Contradictions	1988	SIGMOD
2	3,986	Type Systems for Querying Class Hierarchies with Non-strict Inheritance.	1989	PODS
3	1,868	Of Objects and Databases: A Decade of Turmoil	1996	VLDB
4	2,768	Modeling Complex Structures in Object-Oriented Databases	1989	PODS
5	6,464	Research Directions in Object-Oriented Database Systems	1990	PODS
6	1,697	The O2 Database Programming Language	1989	VLDB
7	849	Object-Oriented Database Systems	1988	PODS
8	13,137	Incorporating Hierarchy in a Relational Model of Data	1989	SIGMOD
9	4,951	A Relationship Mechanism for a Strongly Typed Object-Oriented Database Programming Language	1991	VLDB
10	13,183	Constructing Database Systems in a Persistent Environment	1987	VLDB