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 uunet!lll-winken!pacbell!osc!rich