Object Databases: Not Just for CAD/CAM Anymore

Current limitations of the Texas library include the lack of multi-user support and the inability to query containers to find certain instances of objects. The query limitation stems from the fact that there are no containers provided with the Texas library. Most commercial object database vendors provide a set of optimized container classes that support queries. These limitations are minor if what you need is a very fast, single user, persistent store of objects. Another limitation is the inability to treat persistent and transient objects transparently. You cannot discover what heap an object is allocated on; this causes problems in objects with pointers to other contained objects. While this is a minor limitation for smaller programs, it does affect development of larger, more complex, multiple-database programs.

The future of Texas looks bright. It is a robust and efficient single user, portable library. A colleague and I are planning to port Texas to Windows NT. This will round out support for the most popular platforms, Solaris, Linux, and NT. We also plan to provide minor enhancements for the transparent treatment of the heaps. STL and a persistent allocator may provide some relief for lack of container and query support, but multi-user support is still off in the future.

Object databases are not the silver bullet of software development, but they do provide a more robust and natural programming environment for people already using an object-oriented programming language. They provide better performance and more performance tuning options than relational databases. For small to medium sized single-user projects, the Texas database is an attractive choice; for larger multi-user projects, you may want to check out ObjectStore from Object Design, Inc. ObjectStore supports a large number of platforms and compilers—unfortunately, not Linux. ObjectStore is a very fast and flexible object database product. For more information on ObjectStore, visit their home page at www.odi.com or subscribe to the ObjectStore development mailing list. (To subscribe, send e-mail to ostore-request@qds.com with no subject and subscribe in the message body.)

Special thanks to Rob Murray of Quantitative Data Systems and Craig Heckman of Superconducting Core Technologies for their great comments and help.

[ORF96] Robert Orfali, Dan Harkey, & Jeri Edwards, The Essential Distributed Objects Survival Guide, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 164, 1996.

[CAT92] R.G.G. Cattell, and J. Skeen. Object Operations Benchmark, ACM Transactions on Database Systems,17(1):1-31, 1992.

[LOO95] Mary E. S. Loomis, Object Databases: The Essentials, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, pp. 197-200, 1995.

[CAT96] R.G.G. Cattell, The Object Database Standard: ODMG - 93, Release 1.2, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1996.

[SIN92] Vivek Singhal, Sheetal V. Kakkad, and Paul R. Wilson, Texas: An Efficient, Portable Persistent Store, Fifth International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems, 1992.Object Databases: Not Just for CAD/CAM Anymore.