OO features of Oracle

First, excuse the cross-posting, but I really wasn't sure where this question belongs. It is more along the lines of the theorectical than anything else.

The company I work for is about to start the second phase of a project, and the programmers are looking for ways to make life easier. To date, the application we are building is object oriented in design and implementation, but tied to a relational database schema, currently Sybase. There is a debate on whether or not to continue to use an RDBMS or jump ship to an object oriented database, such as ObjectStore. Reasons for doing so are: 1.) The belief that the OODBMS will be faster; 2.) The amount of coding needed will be less since the objects the application creates will be stored right into the database. No need to create seperate code for inserting the data into the database; 3.) Currently the application uses client side caching of all the data, which makes keeping consistent data among users difficult. ObjectStore has features that will keep client caches in synch. Some reasons not to take this approach are: 1.) No experience with an OODBMS; 2.) No assurance an OODBMS will be faster than an RDBMS with large amounts of data; 3.) Licensing for the OODBMS is very expensive in comparison to an RDBMS. 4.) The users in the field already have dbas familar with Sybase/Oracle; not an OODBMS.

I have tried to make the case for using the OO features of Oracle to lighten the coding problem, while changing the application design to use the database as a means of supporting multi-user functionality.

Has anyone used the OO features of Oracle with success on a large application with lots of data? How was the experience-- good and bad? Is there a performance penalty for trying to use Oracle in an object oriented fashion vice a traditional relational approach? If so, how bad was the performance hit?

I'd appreciate any comments on the topic, especially if you happen to know what the future of OO in Oracle might be. It seemed to be a big issue a couple of years ago, but it seems to have died away.

Thanks for your help,

Mike Shoop Received on Fri Jul 02 1999 - 03:04:30 CDT