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.