Re: Clean Object Class Design -- What is it?

akmal _at_ city wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, Lee Fesperman wrote:
> > akmal _at_ city wrote:
> > > On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, Jim Melton wrote:
> > > > Your statement is false because there is no commercially available database
> > > > today that can achieve the real-world performance of (most, many, all?)
> > > > object databases.
> > >
> > > For what kind of applications? (most, many, all?)
> > >
> > I must say that was quite an overreaching statement. It apparently includes operations
> > where object databases clearly perform poorly --- like ad-hoc queries.
> >
> I agree. Even in cases where an application has been "objectified", there
> may not be any significant performance gain provided by an OODB. Example:
>
> ...

Actually, I didn't want to turn up the flame wars, but that one was particularly egregious.

OO *is* better than the previous generally used method of creating software, but it is hardly a panacea. It's fine for modeling software artifacts, especially when compared to what went before. However, its capability in modeling the real world is weak (see, for instance, C. J. Date's article on Debunkings -- http://www.firstsql.com/dbdebunk/cjd8a.htm).

In all the OO systems I've seen, everything is built with single direction linking - (pointers, references, composite objects). Inheritance is even worse; it is purely hierachical.

That's fine for programmers who are used to it and don't have any better tools anyway, but a non-programmer wants to get from customer to invoice or from invoice to customer without having to know you must a different link/technique/concept for one direction versus the other.

I started programming in the '60s and don't see any ideas in OO that weren't known then. Combining data and behavior was possible with Forth in the '60s.

-- 
Lee Fesperman, FFE Software, Inc. (http://www.firstsql.com)
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