The Language-Independent Interface of the Thor Persistent Object System

Thor is a new object-oriented database system being developed at MIT. It allows applications written in diierent programming languages, and possibly running on heterogeneous machines and operating systems, to share objects conveniently. Our goal is to provide safe sharing of objects with higher-level semantics than is typical for today's le systems and databases, while still providing good performance. This paper describes the interface of Thor and also discusses some of the implementation techniques we are using to achieve our performance goal.