Database Entries

Database entries are addressed via the LOID (local object identifier), which leads to the EBI that contains the absolute file position (which may change, when a database entry is growing).

There are mainly two different types of database entries:

• instance entries referring to an object instance
• reference entries referring to a collection

Instance entries may refer to typed object instances defined by a data type definition. Object instances do have a fixed size, always.Instance entries may also refer to text instances (MEMO) or binary instances (BLOB). The encoding for text instances depends on the data type (STRING, LATIN1, ASCII, UTF8 etc.). Since text and binary instances may grow while being updated, those are always stored as single references.

The structure of reference entries depends on the type of reference

• single instance reference
• multiple instance reference (collection)

Single instance references are defined by setting the dimension attribute for the reference or relationship to 1. Multiple instance or collection references define