System Facilities for CAD Databases

In this paper, an attempt is made to lay out the special needs of design databases, as compared to the facilities provided in conventional database systems now commercially available. The paper starts from a point of commonality and focusses on the limitations and shortcomings commonly found in current database systems. It is impossible and unwise to make universal statements about DBMS capabilities. Instead, the goal is to identify those special features that, by their capability, provide distinctions beyond the general notions of speed and ratio of logical size to physical size.