Inheritance Modelling Design

Question

Hi, there. I'm a newbie here. I've just finished installing my Oracle Designer and now I've got a trouble in Designing Inheritance Object. I still don't know yet how to design an inheritance object using Oracle Designer.
I'd tried using a Reverse Engineering which already had an inheritance table inside the database, and here is the database script:
CREATE TYPE person_typ AS OBJECT (
idno NUMBER,
name VARCHAR2(30),
phone VARCHAR2(20),
MAP MEMBER FUNCTION get_idno RETURN NUMBER,
STATIC FUNCTION show_super (person_obj in person_typ) RETURN VARCHAR2,
MEMBER FUNCTION show RETURN VARCHAR2)
NOT FINAL;
CREATE TYPE BODY person_typ AS
MAP MEMBER FUNCTION get_idno RETURN NUMBER IS
BEGIN
RETURN idno;
END;
-- static function that can be called by subtypes
STATIC FUNCTION show_super (person_obj in person_typ) RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
BEGIN
RETURN 'Id: ' || TO_CHAR(person_obj.idno) || ', Name: ' || person_obj.name;
END;
-- function that can be overriden by subtypes
MEMBER FUNCTION show RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
BEGIN
RETURN person_typ.show_super ( SELF );
END;
END;
CREATE TYPE student_typ UNDER person_typ (
dept_id NUMBER,
major VARCHAR2(30),
OVERRIDING MEMBER FUNCTION show RETURN VARCHAR2)
NOT FINAL;
CREATE TYPE BODY student_typ AS
OVERRIDING MEMBER FUNCTION show RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
BEGIN
RETURN person_typ.show_super ( SELF ) || ' -- Major: ' || major ;
END;
END;
Then I tried to implemented back to the database using the DDL script which was generated by Oracle Designer, but I found an error showing that the Oracle Designer did not support the multiple inheritance.
Is there any solution or other way to design an inheritance type or table? Or is there any online tutorial which is teaching me how to design an inheritance object?
Thanks a lot,
Hendra

Answer 1

All I can do is point you at the Statement of Direction - http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/forms/pdf/10g/ToolsSOD.pdf. I didn't say that Designer doesn't support object modeling at all, only that it is incomplete and doesn't support object/relational enhancements in Oracle RDBMS since about (I'm estimating here) version 9iR1. But a lot of the inheritance features were not in the supported version of Oracle, hence your problem.
While JDeveloper has object modeling tools, and these are pretty good IMHO, they are modeling Java classes, not Oracle object types, so they don't generate CREATE TYPE and CREATE TYPE BODY commands. So you won't find what you want in a tool by Oracle. Oracle plans to have some modeling tools in a future version of Oracle SQL Developer, but this is a fairly recent announcement and the details are yet to be revealed. So I don't know if it will support modeling of Oracle Object types.
There may be a third party tool that has what you need - but I haven't really checked this out.