Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Object-Oriented Database Management Systems (OODBMS), which emerged in the 1990s, quickly found their niche in handling complex data types; however, the long-term vision of OODBMSs to replace relational databases has never materialized. The author points out that OODBMS technology remains a small niche market, generating only around a few hundred million dollars in revenues, compared to the multi-billion dollar relational database market. The paper states that the goals of large relational database vendors, such as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, have been to synthesize the best of relational databases and OODBMs, such as the flexibility of the OODBMS data model and the performance of relational database functions, into an Object-Relational Database Management System.

From the Paper:

"OODBMSs first started to be researched in the 1980s and the first commercial products gradually appeared in the early 1990s from vendors such as Object Design, Objectivity, Versant, Computer Associates and Ardent. By the late 1980s and early 1990s it was recognized that object oriented (OO) languages had some very strong advantages over non-OO languages for many programming applications. OODBMSs emerged to reduce the impedance mismatch between the programming languages and the DBMS, to offer performance advantages (due to navigation from roots and sophisticated caching and swizzling technologies), and to provide transparent support for complex user-defined types including the ability to store, call and query complex objects directly."

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