Fitting round objects into square databases

Abstract

Object-oriented systems could use much of the functionality of database systems to manage their objects. Persistence, object identity, storage management, distribution and concurrency control are some of the things that database systems traditionally handle well. Unfortunately there is a fundamental difference in philosophy between the object-oriented and database approaches, namely that of object independence versus data independence. We discuss the ways in which this difference in outlook manifests itself, and we consider the possibilities for resolving the two views, including the current work on object-oriented databases. We conclude by proposing an approach to co-existence that blurs the boundary between the object-oriented execution environment and the database.