RDMS or OODBMS

[Marcus Bointon]

> on 2/14/03 9:21 AM, Tim Davis at timdavis at amug.org wrote:
>>   A quick curiosity question. I've been reading a bit about "Object
>> Oriented" databases or "Post-Relational" databases. I'm not clear on
>> what these are, but I've always seen a close relationship between
>> relational databases and object oriented programming. Is Valentina
>> strictly relational, or does it have qualities of an object oriented
>> database system?

Something that I've come to realise is that there is a fundamental conflict
between the world-views of OO programming and the typical RDBMS. If you
implement an RDBMS as a back-end for an OO system, in a clean OO structure,
you will typically for each object to be responsible for its own storage and
retrieval (normal encapsulation). This will work fine, but it ends up being
horribly inefficient - if you request an array of 10,000 of these objects,
it will result in 10,000 queries being made to the database, an operation
that would be possible in a single (and much, much faster) procedural call.
It seems that what is needed is the ability to directly bind an object to
its data, without incurring the overhead of the SQL interface. This is
possible with Valentina in RB in particular.

This problem affects some big projects - for example I happen to know that
lastminute.com had exactly this problem. Major changes to their (very clean)
J2EE implementation resulted in a 500-fold reduction in load on their
databases!

Marcus
-- 
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture

marcus at synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk