A Data Manager for Engineering Applications

Efficient data management is crucial to the success of a CAD/CAM system.Traditional database systems,designed to deal with only regular and structural data,cannot efficiently manage design data. In this paper,we present a data manager called EDBMS/2,which has been developed by our laboratory for engineering support applications.EDBMS/2 has a data model that combines features of both relational and semantic ones and owns flexible abilities for modeling engineering data,such as variable-length data processing,integrated management of structured data and unstructured data,and composite object handling.Mechanisms based on DBV and DBV graph concepts,proposed in EDBMS/2,make EDBMS/2 own powerful abilities for version management and run efficiently.By now,EDBMS/2 has been used successfully in EDCADS(integrated Electronic Devices CAD environ- ment)project and as a lower level support to develop an object-oriented DBMS for mechanical engineering.