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The Real Benefits of Object-Relational DB-Technology for Object-Oriented Software Development

Weiping Zhang, Norbert Ritter

University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
P.O. Box 3049, 67653 Kaiserslautern
{wpzhang, ritter}@informatik.uni-kl.de

Full paper ( PDF version )

Abstract

Object-oriented programming languages (OOPLs like C++, Java, etc.) have established themselves in the development of complex software systems for more than a decade. With the integration of object-oriented concepts, object-relational database management systems (ORDBMSs) aim at supporting new generation software systems better and more efficiently. Facing the situation that nowadays more and more software development teams use OOPLs `on top of' (O)RDBMSs, i. e., access (object-)relational databases from applications developed in OOPLs, this paper reports on our investigations on assessing the contribution of object-relational database technology to object-oriented software development. First, a conceptual examination shows that there is still a considerable gap between the object-relational paradigm (as represented by the SQL:1999 standard) and the object-oriented paradigm. Second, empirical studies (performed by using our new benchmark approach) point at mechanisms, which are not part of SQL:1999 but would allow to reduce the mentioned gap. Thus, we encourage the integration of such mechanisms, e. g., support for navigation and complex objects (structured query results), into ORDBMSs in order to be really beneficial for new generation software systems.

in: Proc. 18th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD 2001), Oxford, July 2001, Advances in Databases, Read, B. (Ed.), LNCS 2097, Springer, pp. 89-104