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Abstract : |
Research on object databases started at the beginning of the 1980s and became very active in the mid 1980s. At the end of the 1980s, a number of start-up companies were created. As a result, a wide variety of products are now commercially available. The products have quickly matured after several years of market presence. Production applications are being deployed in various areas: CAD (computer aided design), software engineering, geographic information systems, financial applications, medical applications, telecommunications, multimedia, and MIS (management information systems). As more and more applications were being developed and deployed, and as more vendors appeared on the market, the user community voiced a clear concern about the risk of divergence of the products, and expressed their need for convergence and standards. The response from the vendor community was both implicit and explicit. Implicit, because as the vendors understoodmore and more the applicationsand the user needs, the systems architecture started to converge and the systems to look alike. Explicit, because the vendors got together to define and promote a standard. The Object Database Management Group (ODMG) was created in 1991 by five object database vendors (O 2 Object Design, Objectivity, Ontos, and Versant) under the chairmanship of Rick Cattell. It published an initial version of a standard interface, was joined by 2 more vendors (Poet and Servio) at the end of 1993, and produced a final revision in early 1994 [Catt94]. Thus, all object database vendors are active members of the group and are totally committed to comply to the standard in future releases of their products. For instance, the current release of O, |
