Whatever Happened to Object-Oriented Databases?

Computer A couple of years ago, industry observers touted object-oriented databases as a technology on the rise, well suited for the emerging Internet age. They said object-oriented databasemanagement systems (ODBMSs) would soon become the primary database technology, supplanting relational databasemanagement systems (RDBMSs), which were not designed to handle the type of multimedia data frequently found on the Internet. As further evidence of this, they said the growth of intranets signaled a decline in the use of client-server networks, on which most relational databases were used. Fast-forward to today, and none of these predictions has come to pass. Relational databases are still by far the most widely used databases. Meanwhile, object-relational database-management systems (ORDBMSs) have added object capabilities to relational databases. They are gaining in popularity and are expected to outsell even relational databases by 2003. And OO databases (see the “OO Database Orientation” sidebar) are still minor players with solid but strictly niche markets. Sales of relational databases have grown considerably faster than the sales of OO databases, and annual worldwide RDBMS revenues are now about 50 times larger. Rick Cattell, distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, indicated, “Objectoriented databases are doing just fine, and the news of their demise is highly exaggerated. While their market [share] isn’t as big, they continue to be used in areas like CAD (computer-aided design) and telecommunications, where RDBMSs are not well suited.” However, said Michael Stonebraker, chief technology officer at Informix and an ORDBMS proponent and pioneer, “ODBMSs occupy a small niche market that has no broad appeal. The technology is in semi-rigor mortis, and ORDBMSs will corner the market within five years.”