Beyond Relations: A Case for Elevating to the Entity-Relationship Abstraction

Spurred by a number of recent trends, we make the case that the relational database systems should urgently move beyond supporting the basic object-relational model and instead embrace a more abstract data model, specifically, the entity-relationship model. We argue that the current RDBMSs don't inherently support sufficient "logical" data independence, and that is relegating the database systems to the role of a backend storage system, away from where significant innovation is both happening and is still needed. We present the design of a prototype system (ErbiumDB) that we are building to explore these issues, and discuss some of the key research challenges.