Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!philmtl!philabs!ttidca!quad1!srhqla!csun!csusac!unify!dgh
From: dgh@unify.UUCP (David Harrington)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Extended RDB vs OODB
Keywords: CASE OODB
Message-ID: <1037@unify.UUCP>
Date: 12 Aug 89 00:34:15 GMT
References: <3560052@wdl1.UUCP> <408@odi.ODI.COM> <3324@rtech.rtech.com>
Reply-To: dgh@unify.UUCP (David Harrington)
Organization: Unify Corporation, Sacramento, CA, USA
Lines: 34

In article <3324@rtech.rtech.com> dennism@menace.UUCP (Dennis Moore (x2435, 1080-276) INGRES/teamwork) writes:
>
>
>I suggest that we will have all these object oriented features before these
>OODBMS companies have distributed database, development tools, bug elimination,
>installed base, customer-driven features, third party developers, high
>performance, and all the other things we expect for our $2K per user.
>

I agree.  Look at the OODBMS companies like Ontologic.  They are either living
off an existing RDBMS which they are trying to re-cast as OO, or they are
dying.

Look at Servio Logic.  It has been building GemStone for at least 5 years, and
as of April of this year had maybe 30 systems installed -- mostly 4 user
systems in R&D labs.  The only reason Servio is still around is that they are
funded by the House of Sampoerna, an Indonesian tobacco company run by a
41-year old Chinese "Tai-Pan" named T. Pao Liem who has MUCH more money than
he needs.  

GemStone has no front-end, no distributed database, no 3rd party
developers (other than a small group of Servio employees in Alameda trying to
build an MRP system in Smalltalk (!) that uses GS as a structure server).

They have based their marketing strategy, such as it is, on an assumption that
the market for OODBMS, which they say is "applications requiring a LOT of
COMPLEX data", will mature at least 5X as fast as the relational market did.

Figuring the R-market took 12-15 years from academia to maturity, they project
(or have been projecting for some time) that the OODBMS market would take off
in 1989. 

I think the path to OODBMS is evolutionary, especially given the huge install
base of RDBMS and applications that use them.