Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!odi!jack
From: jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Extended RDB vs OODB
Message-ID: <1989Aug17.141620.24941@odi.com>
Date: 17 Aug 89 14:16:20 GMT
References: <3560052@wdl1.UUCP> <408@odi.ODI.COM> <3324@rtech.rtech.com> <1989Aug11.143036.24703@odi.com> <1765@ethz.UUCP>
Reply-To: jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein)
Organization: Object Design Inc., Burlington, MA
Lines: 34

In article <1765@ethz.UUCP> marti@ethz.UUCP (Robert Marti) writes:
>With respect to the ongoing debate concerning OODBs vs extended RDBs,
>I'd like to see proof (make that circumstatial evidence, if you prefer)
>that an OODB which supports traditional basic DBMS features such as
>concurrency control, transactions, set-oriented data manipulation,
>the ability to define views and to dynamically add new tables/columns,
>etc. is
>
>1) faster than a relational system for typical technical/engineering
>   applications than a relational system, and
>
>2) not much slower than a relational system for traditional business
>   oriented applications.
>
>How about some benchmarks, controversial as they may be?

Speaking for the system we're building at Object Design: The system is
based on C++. Concurrency control, transactions, and set-oriented data
manipulation (as well as one-at-a-time processing) will all be present
in our system. View definition is tricky to define - how does it
differ from simply writing another C++ object class? As for
dynamically adding tables and columns: We have set-valued types,
modeled as C++ classes (which are analogous to relational tables),
instances of which can be dynamically allocated, as is the case with
any C++ object class. "Adding columns" is a relational notion that
does not have a clear OO counterpart, (I'd be interested in hearing
about analogies that anyone would care to offer.)

No benchmarks (yet), but a forthcoming posting addresses one aspect of
the performance issue for CAx applications.


Jack Orenstein
Object Design, Inc.