Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!pacbell!osc!rich
From: rich@osc.COM (Richard Fetik)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: More on OODB's vs. R/OO/DBMS's
Keywords: OODB RDBMS CASE
Message-ID: <486@osc.COM>
Date: 16 Aug 89 05:06:53 GMT
References: <3359@rtech.rtech.com>
Reply-To: rich@osc.UUCP (Richard Fetik)
Organization: Object Sciences Corp., Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 53

In article <3359@rtech.rtech.com> dennism@menace.UUCP (Dennis Moore (x2435, 1080-276) INGRES/teamwork) writes:
	
>Basically, in summary, you may have a point on any [sic] of your issues.
>However, you don't back up your assertions with facts, and they are highly
>suspect (to me, at least) as a result.  I think it is easy to imagine that
>RDBMS's can be extended with OO capabilities, and this is widely documented
>(as in TPP, above).  If you have a valid criticism of PARTICULAR RDBMS's,
>feel free to criticize.  If you think that RDBMS's are architecturally
>incapable of doing what your OODB will do, you are quite wrong, and you will
>soon see the folly of this point of view, as RDBMS's come out with the same OO
>features and capabilities, AND MORE.
>
>-- Dennis Moore, my own opinions, etc etc etc

Dennis, I don't have time now to touch on most of the issues you mentioned,
but on the topic of extending rdbms to provide oo capabilities, please think
about 
1. the extra overhead as the oo model/paradigm must be converted by at least
   an additional layer of software if put on top of an rdb;
2. whether it is possible to extend the rdb sufficiently to provide a
   'transparent' (non-obtrusive) persistent object environment;
   (sorry, 'BLOBS' are not objects.)
3. whether the oo model may have capabilities which just can not be faked
   by any stretching of the underlying relational software. 

It's true that I don't provide these answers here, but if, after thinking about
the number of machine instructions executed for some arbitrary number of
object fetches using both an extended rdbms and a true oodbms, you still
don't see the performance advantage, I'll mail you lots of numbers/papers/etc.

I haven't seen any claim that the rdbms companies would go out of business
tomorrow (or next year), but I do have experience with UNIFY in a
communications project a few years ago.  After fighting slow performance,
we pulled it out and replaced it with a primitive memory resident/flat file
combination.  My expectation is that a mature oodb product will be about 1/3 
to 1/4 as fast as this type of design, while I know that UNIFY was about 1/100
times as fast.  After some benchmarks get published early next year we'll see
how the initial crop does in comparison to the rdbms's.

BTW, I think I saw INDEX described as the largest CASE vendor in their
press release when they announced the Ontologic deal.  Were they desparate,
or what??  Wouldn't they have gone for a relational dbms if they could've ??
instead of forking over so much money for an alpha test version from a
very non-stable company ??  

I will mail you stuff as soon as time permits; anyone else that wants to be
put on the mailing list can also send me their name/info.  There'll 
probably be too much to post, and most of it will not be of interest to
most of the relational folks.

-- 
					rich@osc.osc.com     415-325-2300
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