Object-oriented Data Management
- Why not relational?
- Supports a small, fixed collection of data types
- numbers, dates, strings, etc.
- complex data must be broken down into simple data
result: loss of information
- Very few operations on data are supported by the DBMS
- select, project, join, aggregate, sort, group
- user-defined programs can be added to the DBMS for data manipulation
result: burden of data integrity is shifted to the users
- What applications would require such capabilities?
- Geographic information systems: maps
- Multimedia information systems: images, video footage, audio data
- CAD/CAM: complex objects with multiple constituent parts
- Document management systems: full length hyperlinked text documents
- Common requirements:
- Support complex objects
- Operations on complex objects
- Extensibility of object and method definition