Re: scalability of OODBMS vs RDBMS?

On 2 Feb 1996, drd wrote:

> is there any info regarding OODBMS vs RDBMS in an OO application with many
> (millions) of records/objects/whatever? i would like to use an OODBMS in
> our application, however, the higher-ups are concerned with the scalability
> (in size and performance) of OODBMS's, and are pushing for an RDBMS.
>
> any info regarding scalability (size and performance) of RDBMS and OODBMS
> (both in specific products and in general) would be greatly appreciated.
>
> thanks!
>
>

Tricky to answer without knowing exactly what kind of processing you will be doing. Some OODBs have limits to DB size. You may want to download some papers from:

        http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/homes/akmal/biblio.html

In particular, I recommend the OCAD Benchmark paper. For comparisons between OODBs and RDBs, some work was done a few years ago at British Telecom and by A.B. Larsen:

British Telecom Benchmark

S. Baker and M.A. Salman (1991) Performance comparison between an object-oriented, a relational and an object management database. Proceedings of Advanced Information Systems, London, UK, 1991, pp. 61-67.

Test Evaluation Procedure (TEP)

A.B. Larsen (1992) A test evaluation procedure for object oriented and relational database management systems. Master's Thesis, Institute of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway, 5 February 1992.

The former showed OODBs performed well for apps which naturally had an OO feel, whilst the latter showed that cache evictions can cause severe problems and performance differences are less than many have suggested for larger database sizes. However, keep in mind that the above references are a little dated now (both OODBs and RDBs have advanced since then). There is some work at CERN where they will be using an OODB for HEP and typically generating 1 TB of data a day when their system becomes operational. I'm not sure if they have considered RDBs for this, however.

I will hopefully also be doing some tests later this year and may get to publish my results subject to my industrial partners and vendors agreeing and if I can find some big enough disks.

Good luck!

        Akmal.

    "A Herring is just a Herring, but a good cigar is a Cuban" - Babylon 5 Received on Mon Feb 05 1996 - 00:00:00 CET