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From: render@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Source Code Control
Message-ID: <39400049@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 23 Jul 89 22:16:00 GMT
References: <5225@mtgzz.att.com>
Lines: 31
Nf-ID: #R:mtgzz.att.com:5225:m.cs.uiuc.edu:39400049:000:1755
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!render    Jul 23 17:16:00 1989


Written  1:15 pm  Jul 20, 1989 by stewartw@warpdrive.UUCP:
>  You raise an excellent point, however, using a conventional relational
>DBMS is not going to be the way to go.  What you are talking about is
>exactly what object databases are meant for.  Unfortunately, we are all
>waiting for someone to write a usable ODB.  Given the amount of effort
>by companies like IBM and HP, they can't be too far away.  

I'm sure IBM and HP appreciate your support, but I think it quite possible
that the big breakthrough in OODBMS work will come elsewhere.  There are 
several indie companies working on them, and at least one (Ontologic) is 
into it's second generation of product.  You must not assume, however,
that the new OODBMS will be have better performance than the RDBMS for
the kinds of applications software engineers plan.  An OODBMS has at
least as many difficult things to support as an RDBMS.  I do think that 
ODBMS are more applicable to SE applications, so hopefully they will be 
optimized in a manner that makes them faster than an RDBMS for what we need.

>   ODB research has more or less come to the conclusion that relational
>DBMS's do not provide the required performance levels to serve as the
>basis for an ODB; otherwise I suspect that ODBs would already be around.

This is a very good point you raise:  if you want performance, you can't
layer incompatible systems.  For this reason, a UNIX box running a RDBMS
application will be slow, just as a OODBMS built on top of an RDBMS will
be slow.  What needs to be done is a ground-up implementation that can
be optimized at every level.  Once an OODBMS has been built in this way, 
we can then determine how usable they will be for software engineering.

Hal Render
render@cs.uiuc.edu