CS262B Reading Summary
Of Objects and Databases: A Decade of Turmoil
Michael J. Carey and David J. DeWitt
Summary by Feng Zhou
2/23/2004
Strong points of the paper are:
- The reasons listed for the failure of database toolkits are
reasonable. Basically, it is really hard to divide a database
system into components with standard interfaces and semantics, and to
provide a toolkit for buildng ever component. There are too many
ways a component needs to behave in order to satisfy all users'
requirements.
- The reasons for the failure of OODB approach are concrete.
It's hard to come up with a viable standard with such a complex
system. Without this standard, user acceptance is hard to
achieve. And the performance advantages of OODBs are often offset
by the lack of sophisticated optimizations implemented as mature RDBMS
systems do. And the number of popular and appearing languages
make good integration and compatibility hard to achieve. Lastly,
the lack of commitment from large vendors is also a very important
reason of its failure.
- Object-relational databases, as an evolutionary approach, have
enjoyed commercial success as the authors predicted. The
object-oriented client wrappers, taking the name of object-relational
mapping tools, are becoming more and more popular. Another interesting
category is mapping tools with language support, such as the JDO
standard for Java.
- One interesting hypothesis from reading the paper is: if a
technology a big inter-related whole that's hard to separate into
clear-defined parts. It's probably not a good idea, even if it
has appealing properties like good performance. Trying to
building a whole new big system will often fail because the repeated
investment needed to just bring the system on par with the old one.