Saturday, October 09, 2004

Mistakes Made by OO Databases

Whatever happened to OODBMSes, anyway? The 5 reasons given are:
1. They were seen as nonscalable and nonperformant.
2. It was "new" technology in a time when only the tried-and-true was being used. 3. It had no compelling features for anybody but the developer.
4. They just didn't perform or scale well at first.
5. OODBMS doesn't store the same way as the RDBMS. This may be the kicker--people building OODBMS systems as if they were RDBMS systems were bound to be hurt by worlds of disappointment, and vice versa (which is where we are today).

1 comment:

Brian Sletten said...

I think the two key issues you mention are 3 and 5. It was great conceptually to lower the O-R impedence mismatch, but losing relational capabilities outweighed convenience from a business perspective. Non-developers couldn't use existing tools to analyze the data in the databases.

Particularly now that technologies such as Hibernate and JDO 2.0 lower the mismatch by providing virtual OODBMSes, there just isn't that much to say in the favor of pure play versions.