PESTO: An Integrated Query/Browser for Object Databases

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of PESTO (Portable Explorer of STructured Objects), a user interface that supports browsing and querying of object databases. PESTO allows users to navigate the relationships that exist among objects. In addition, users can formulate complex object queries through an integrated query paradigm ("query-in-place") that presents querying as a natural extension of browsing. PESTO is designed to be portable to any object database system that supports a high-level query language; in addition, PESTO is extensible, providing hooks for specialized predicate formation and object display tools for new data types (e.g., images or text). 1 Introduction The Garlic project at the IBM Almaden Research Center [Care95] is developing a system and associated tools for managing large quantities of heterogeneous multimedia information. The goal of Garlic is to permit both traditional and multimedia data residing in a variety of existing data repositories ...