Object Management Process, Issues and Application Examples

Abstract

In this chapter, we will introduce Object Management Process (OMP) in a more generalized sense. As mentioned in Chapter 1, an object, in general, may refer to an indivisible entity ranging from a small text file to a large volume multimedia file, depending on the underlying application. For instance, in database systems these objects can be categorized systematically in the form of text files, audio clips, graphic files, video clips ranging from small to large sizes and can be indexed in a clever manner to aid faster retrieval. Thus, an object is an entity defined by its type and size. Further, some objects can be altered, i.e., they may be “edited” which means that the size of such objects is a varying quantity. Additionally, in a network system, transferring an object from one node to another may be required by some application which will consume a varying network bandwidth. Managing the objects on a network system is an important issue which we call Object Management Process (OMP). We will introduce some methodologies of OMP and some performance metrics that are commonly used to quantify the performance of these methodologies.