Re: OODB

neil wrote:
>"Scotty" <invallid_at_invalid.spam> wrote in message
>>
>> Do they exist or are they a figment of a college lecturers
>> imagination?
>
>Lots exist and are absolutely wonderful things to study. You should avoid
>them in the real world, however, if the following things are important to
>you:

That's basically what I was wondering, are they just an academics idea of a good time or are they truly implemented in 'Real Life'. My college seems to have dropped a large amount of syllabus dedicated to OODB's giving only two lectures when previously it was 5 with a large content of the final exam, OODB's have been completely dropped from the exam and we've mainly concentrated on OLAP, Data Warehousing, Data Mining, XML and security, which are all fairly useful study areas from my understanding.

>1 data integrity
>2 ad-hoc querying with SQL
>3 data-extraction using third party reporting tools that rely heavily on
>2 above (E.g. MS-Word)
>4 data is manipulated using multiple applications

Oh, so pretty much everything a database is needed for :-)

>They are, however, a programmer's dream come true, and can be used to
>produce prototypes very quickly where users aren't important. My own
>particular favourite for this sort of prototyping is the ZODB included with
>the open source Zope (http://www.zope.org) - a very handy web application
>development tool.

Yes it fits in perfectly with the OODM, it's a shame it takes no account of the business model. My thoughts on OODB's are that you'd end up shaping the business structure to fit the database whereas the relational model looks at relationships between the data and hence fits the business model, sort of like the tail wagging the dog. Would you agree or not? Received on Mon Nov 25 2002 - 15:40:49 CET