Re: Implementation of object database in relational database

Many years ago, the INCITS H2 Database Standards Committee(nee ANSI X3H2 Database Standards Committee) had a meeting in Rapid City, South Dakota. We had Mount Rushmore and Bjarne Stroustrup as special attractions. Mr. Stroustrup did his slide show about Bell Labs inventing C++ and OO programming for us and we got to ask questions.

One of the questions was how we should put OO stuff into SQL. His answer was that Bells Labs, with all their talent, had tried four different approaches to this problem and come the conclusion that you should not do it. OO was great for programming but deadly for data.

I have watched people try to force OO models into SQL and it falls apart in about a year. Every typo becomes a new attribute or class, queries that would have been so easy in a relational model are now multi-table monster outer joins, redundancy grows at an exponential rates, constraints are virtually impossible to write so you can kiss data integrity goodbye, etc. Received on Thu May 26 2005 - 17:32:43 CEST