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From: marti@mint.inf.ethz.ch (Robert Marti)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: The Price of Object Oriented Database Systems for Education
Message-ID: <25715@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 20 Feb 91 13:09:47 GMT
References: <4798@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Sender: news@neptune.inf.ethz.ch
Reply-To: marti@mint.inf.ethz.ch (Robert Marti)
Organization: Departement Informatik, ETH, Zurich
Lines: 31

In article <4798@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> isaac@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au
(Isaac Balbin) writes:
>Has anyone else experienced this:
>We were banking (sic) on using a real live [OODBMS in a Masters program]
>to give the students some hands-on experience.  [...] Sadly, neither
>[Ontologic nor Servio Logic] have any concept of the VERY SMALL
>amounts of money available to University departments.
>We were quoted large amounts of money which became even larger when
>we said that 10-15 students (heaven forbid) would be using it.

We have made a similar experience with respect to expert system shells
(Nexpert Object, to be precise).  Their Swiss contributor, an obscure
little firm by the name of Koller+Partners, apparently even made a few
snide remarks at a recent public Nexpert presentation to the effect that
the Computer Science Department of ETH were still living in the middle
ages since they were not using their great product!

As for using an OODBMS, you might want to consider using Postgres from
UC Berkeley.  Even though their system is "post-relational" rather than
"object-oriented", it fulfills most of the requirements of an OODBMS
as laid down in the "Object-Oriented Database Manifesto" by Messrs
Atkinson, Bancilhon, Dittrich, and Maier.  We're using Postgres in a
research project and we're pretty happy with it so far.  One caveat:
Some of the more advanced functionality isn't fully implemented yet
(but at least the manual says so ;-).

--
Robert Marti                      |  Phone:    +41 1 254 72 60
Institut fur Informationssysteme  |  FAX:      +41 1 262 39 73
ETH-Zentrum                       |  E-Mail:   marti@inf.ethz.ch
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland       |