Re: use of nested tables to resolve many to many relationships

Thomas

I was lucky enough to talk to some of the Oracle core developers at around the time the O/R features were being developed (late 80s/early 90s). Incredibly bright guys; but essentially they were (and still are) comp sci experts, not typical Oracle developers/DBAs. To sum it up, "it seemed like a good idea at the time". DBMS competition was more intense, so there was more pressure for "me too" features - and Oracle was a much more seat of the pants affair in those days. Heck, even I got to meet Larry once...

There is a quite plausible case to say that Oracle's (and Informix, etc) opportunistic adoption of object features headed off the much vaunted competition from "real" object databases from companies like Versant (current market cap $73M) and databases like ObjectStore (now owned by Progress...) which at one point were seriously expected to blow away the "legacy" RDBMS vendors.

There are "use cases" that sound(ed) plausible. But like you, I've never come across one in anger...

Regards Nigel

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