Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!bellcore!texbell!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!odi!dlw
From: dlw@odi.com (Dan Weinreb)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Extended RDB vs OODB
Message-ID: <1989Aug17.152708.27900@odi.com>
Date: 17 Aug 89 15:27:08 GMT
References: <3560052@wdl1.UUCP> <408@odi.ODI.COM> <3324@rtech.rtech.com>
	<1989Aug11.143036.24703@odi.com> <1765@ethz.UUCP> 
Reply-To: dlw@odi.com
Organization: Object Design, Inc.
Lines: 68
In-reply-to: cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET's message of 17 Aug 89 00:32:58 GMT

In article  cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) writes:

   The one flaw in this request is that proof of concept can't be provided if the
   concept hasn't been defined.  I agree with Jon Krueger in that there is too
   much hand-waving in this discussion ("our system is better than yours")
   without defining the problem that is trying to be met.

Indeed.  This cannot be emphasized strongly enough.

The term "object-oriented database system" is currently being used by
a fairly large number of research and product development groups.
It's clear from the published literature that the term covers quite a
lot of ground.  Some of these systems have things in common with
others in some respects, while differing greatly in other respects.

I have been at least as guilty as anyone of adding to the confusion,
with my recent postings, and I apologize for not being more specific
and clear.  While I have been following the research reports of quite
a few different groups and consider many of them very interesting, my
own attention has (naturally) been focused on the specific product
that I'm working on at Object Design.  It's only one of a vast range
of approaches that can legitimatly call themselves "object-oriented
database systems".  In the future, I will be more explicit about what
I'm referring to.

There's no official definition of "object-oriented database systems".
Various groups of people have proposed definitions and criteria, but
naturally there is no particular group that is obviously qualified to
rule on a universal definition for the whole database community.

Anyone who wants to get a better sense of the diversity of the field,
and also get an overall feeling for what kinds of things are being
worked on, might want to read:

The Proceedings of the 1986 International Workshop on Object-Oriented
Database Systems, edited by Dittrich and Dayal, ACM order number 472861,
ISBN 0-8186-0734-3, IEEE Computer Society Order Number 734.  235 pages.

Proceedings of the 1989 ACM SIGMOD, also published as SIGMOD Record
Vol 18, No. 2, June 1989.  There are six papers in the two sessions on
object-oriented databases, reasonably representative of the latest
work in the area.  Much other interesting work has appeared in the
SIGMOD proceedings of the last five years.

ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol. 5, No. 1, Jan 87,
Special Issue On Object-Oriented Systems.  This special issue contains
five extensive articles about five research efforts in object-oriented
database systems, all different.  The articles have extensive references,
through which the interested reader can find a wealth of related material.

Also, all three proceedings of the OOPSLA conference have interesting
papers on the topic.

ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 1987 has an excellent and
extensive article called "Types and Persistence in Database
Programming Languages", by Atkinson and Buneman.  It discusses the
question of integration of languages with database systems, which is
of great interest to some, but not all, of the object-oriented
database efforts.

ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 19, No. 3, Sept 1987 has another excellent
and extensive article, this one called "Semantic Database Modelling:
Survey, Applications, and Research Issues" by Hull and King.  Semantic
database models have some relationship to object-oriented database
models, although what the relation consists in is something of a topic
of debate.  Nonetheless, I think the article is practically required
reading for anyone who intends to work on object-oriented database
systems.