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From: moiram@tekcae.CAX.TEK.COM (Moira Mallison)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Extended RDB vs OODB
Message-ID: <3046@tekcae.CAX.TEK.COM>
Date: 23 Aug 89 17:11:15 GMT
References: <3560052@wdl1.UUCP> <408@odi.ODI.COM> <3324@rtech.rtech.com> <1989Aug11.143036.24703@odi.com> <1765@ethz.UUCP>
Reply-To: moiram@tekcae.CAX.TEK.COM (Moira Mallison)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 45

In article <1765@ethz.UUCP> marti@ethz.UUCP (Robert Marti) writes:
>With respect to the ongoing debate concerning OODBs vs extended RDBs...
>How about some benchmarks, controversial as they may be?

>Btw:  For me, functionality is a much more important point than
>performance.  However, most OODB followers emphasize the superior
>performance of OODBs.  So:  Put up or ...  :-)

We have recently published a technical report specifying the
Tektronix HyperModel Benchmark[1], an application-oriented evaluation
strategy for engineering DBMSs based on a generic hypertext system.
We outline functionality requirements as well as the performance
requirement that resulted from our study of engineering applications.

The functionality requirements include data model requirements (eg,
ability to model complex object structures, data type extensibility)
and database system requirements (eg. client-server architecture,
concurrency control).

To measure performance, we use 22 operations.  Several of the 
operations are similar to those specified in the (Sun) Simple
Database Operations Benchmark [2].  In addition, we define
several variations of closure traversals over a 1-N hierarchy
and an M-N hierarchy, and editing operations on the formnodes and
textnodes.

The technical report presents the results of implementing the
benchmark using the GemStone and Vbase systems.  I am currently
working on RDBMS implementations (Ingres, Unify).  However, for
reasons irrelevant to this discussion, the motivating factor 
behind the RDBMS implementations was not to compare them with
OODBMS, so the development is on a different platform. It is 
uncertain when we will get everything on a single platform,
so that we can make some real comparisons.


Moira Mallison
CAX Data Management

[1] Anderson, Berre, Mallison, Porter, Schneider; The Tektronix
HyperModel Benchmark Specification, Tektronix TR #89-05, August, 1989.

[2] Rubenstein, Kubicar, Cattell; "Benchmarking Simple Database Operations,"
in Proceedings of the 1987 ACM SIGMOD Int'l Conference on the Management of
Data, SF, CA, May, 1987.