Re: OODB

"Scotty" <invallid_at_invalid.spam> wrote in message news:j0d4uuk4qhqjeoojutk8g66d2k180m3qp5_at_4ax.com...
> 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?

In some cases, large, well-managed teams can get some good results from an OODB. Just look at one of the most popular applications in the world, MS-Outlook for a terrific example. Masses of functionality, really easy to use and total acceptance by millions of users. However, if you check back to the 4 points above, you will see that this is done at their expense, with the exception of integration with other MS-Office applications. I wish that MS had decided to use an RDBMS to store the Outlook info. Then it would have been an outstanding application.

As far as your last comment goes, I am not sure that the database choice need influence things as much as you say. I am sure one can develop a business model that can be implemented equally well with an OODB or an RDB. The main thing for me is that an RDBMS comes with internally managed constraints on the data and an ad hoc querying language that is standard enough to be used with many different client applications. Received on Mon Nov 25 2002 - 18:01:55 CET