Description
A significant amount of programmer activity in understanding, changing, and debugging software is information management. To address this need, the OMEGA programming environment uses a relational database system to manage program information, and a menu-driven, graphics-based user interface to view, access and update software.
In this paper, we show how to represent programs in the relational model and how traditional programming tasks such as symbol table management are simplified through use of a database. We suggest extensions to relational systems to support more efficient access of recursive data structures, queries involving transitive closure and allow application-specific detection of triggers. These extensions can be used for applications other than programming environments.