Modeling controlled sparsity of databases’ entity-object subschemas

In the process of creating information systems at the enterprise level, we always have to solve the same problem – to design a subschema, in the tables of which the lists of objects will be placed. Ideally, there should be one object table in the database, which will be used in all associations in which the objects participate. However, a wide range of requirements for the structural organization of objects lists, such as compactness, modifiability, semantic unambiguous identifiability, and a number of others, force the objects table to be partitioned into many local tables to accommodate in the latter objects with similar properties and identical appointments. The paper calls into question the dogma of compactness, which leads to an avalanche-like increase in the number of object’s tables, and as an alternative, the concept of controlled sparsity is put forward. Following this concept allows database creators, at the discretion of the user, to combine into one object type the set of local compact types. We proposed the structural framework, which includes two interrelated blocks: the block of objects’ types and metablock. The later contains meta-types, meta-relationships, and meta-constraints that collectively provide and guarantee the correctness of objects’ data placed in the database.