Object-Oriented DBMS and Beyond

摘要

Over the past 10+ years, object-oriented database systems have gone a long way from research prototypes to commercial products to real-life mission-critical applications. Currently, we also witness the extension of relational systems with salient object features, resulting in so-called object-relational DBMS. In this paper, we introduce and review the salient features of both ap-proaches, discuss their merits and shortcomings, and for which lands of applications they are best suited. We also elaborate on further nec-essary improvements of the current state of the art. Furthermore, we will speculate about several upcoming areas of database research in a broad sense (like global information systems, workflow management, component technology) where object-orientation and object-relational and object-oriented database systems in particular might (and should!) play a leading role.