Representatives from ODBMS and ORM vendors incl. BEA, Microsoft, and Sun explored the "State of the Union" in 2006
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Nov. 8, 2006 - ODBMS.ORG, a vendor-independent
non-profit group of high-profile software experts lead by Prof. Roberto
Zicari, today announced the release of an exclusive transcript
of last month's OOPSLA panel on "Objects and Databases", which
discussed the difficulties and different strategies of dealing with
persistence in object-oriented programming environments.
The panelists were:
- William Cook (Moderator), University of Texas at Austin
- Robert Greene, Versant
- Derek Henninger, Progress Software
- Patrick Linskey, BEA
- Erik Meijer, Microsoft
- Craig Russell, Sun Microsystems
- Bob Walker, GemStone Systems
- Christof Wittig, db4objects
A podcast of the entire 1.5 hrs. session is available on www.odbmsjournal.org, a full transcript of the panel discussion is available here for immediate and free download.
It is a unique document of this first high profile panel related to
object database technology for many years, underlining the growing
importance of solutions to handle the object-relational mismatch,
including object databases (ODBMS) and object-relational mappers (ORM).
Robert Greene
from Versant explained the superiority of object databases in cases of
very large and complex models, e.g. in massive multi-player games,
where object databases were, in one instance, able to reduce the number
of servers from 150,000 to 70,000. At the same time he admitted the
need for interoperability with relational databases.
On a similar note, Derek Henninger from
Progress, the company that provides ObjectStore as well as ORMs, gave
examples where object databases clearly excelled over relational
solutions by avoiding excessive Joins over 20 or more tables, or by
providing navigational capabilities which are important to GIS systems,
for instance.
Patrick Linskey from BEA, formerly Solarmetric, explained the
organizational benefits of ORMs, because they would enable negotiations
between developers and DBAs over data model decisions, rather than
forcing one party into the needs of the other. While he admitted the
benefits of ODBMSs in data federation and partitioning, he saw them
only in a niche, not serving the heterogeneous data requirements in a
modern enterprise, which go beyond objects and tables.
Microsoft's Erik Meijer refuted attempts
to build Uber models and made a point for stability in data models: "I
think data should not evolve... I really think it's a bad idea if it's
easy to change your data." The other panelists unanimously disagreed
with this and pointed at several examples where agility is a must or
where it brings a competitive advantage. Erik, on the other hand, saw
Monads, first explained by mathematicians in the 1920s, as the solution
to the problems at hand, which would make data accessible in ever
changing ways, while the data itself would not be changed.
Craig Russell from Sun Microsystems, who was the lead for the
JDO ORM specifications, likened the problem to a restaurant, where the
food preparation is separated from its consumption: "There's a real
separation in my mind between what is in the kitchen and what shows up
on your plate. My focus is what is on the plate."
Bob Walker from Gemstone Systems explained that GemStone
Smalltalk was the first to integrate persistence into the language and,
at the time, saw Java going a step back, which haunts OO developers
today. With Native Queries, LINQ, and other language integrated
persistence APIs he saw the original approach being validated and
coming back. He sees the future in a "distributed in-memory live object
cache that has transactional attributes but it doesn't deal with disk
space storage what so ever."
Christof Wittig from db4objects said that ODBMS have found their
place as an embeddable component, be it in software-enabled devices or
in SOA application silos. ORMs are only a "band aid" - good enough as a
compromise -, but not a solution to all object persistence problems.
Where appropriate, he said, developers should reclaim the data layer,
and their open source object database db4o gave them the power to do
so.
Editor ODBMS.ORG
Prof. Dr. Roberto Zicari
www.odbms.org