Object database: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:53, 9 June 2003

Revision as of 21:47, 10 June 2003

Line 6:

Of course this has advantages and disadvantages. The ability to stay with an OO paradigm does great things for productivity. However, the RDBMS model is a mature and proven one that has had decades of development and testing.

Certain benchmarks between ODBMS and RDBMS have shown that ODBMS can be clearly superior. One of the main reasons is that ODBMS do not use joins to associate objects but references which are usually implemented as pointers. In the RDBMS model, a join would in most cases minimally require a search through a [[B-Treetree]] index. In general, navigation in an ODBMS is via travesing references, whereas in an RDBMS data is joined in an ad-hoc fashion (which is better for arbitrary queries).

The successful market segments for ODBMS seem to be in telecommunications, high energy physics and subsets of financial services. The things that work against ODBMS seem to be the lack of interoperability with a great number of tools/features that are taken for granted in the RDBMS world including but not limited to industry standard connectivity, reporting tools, OLAP tools and backup and recovery standards. Additionally, ODBMS lacks a formal mathematical foundation, unlike the relational model, which rests upon the firm and well-understood mathematical basis of the [[relational calculus]].