One of the main driving force which influenced the introduction of new generation database systems, such as ODBMS, was Object Oriented Programming (OOP). C++ is notably one of the most important. I had the pleasure to interview Bjarne Stroustrup who invented C++.
Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ and the author of “The C++ Programming Language” and “The Design and Evolution of C++”. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He is actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++.
Dr. Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Chair Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M; University. He retains a link with AT&T; Labs – Research as an AT&T; Fellow. Member of the National Academy of Engineering. ACM fellow. IEEE Fellow. Bjarne Personal Page
1. What is “Innovation” for you?
I basically agree with Edison: “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. There are few great ideas, and many good ones. Even the great ones require much work to validate them and to make them into useful tools for someone. I think he called it “invention”, though, but the main point is that you need a good idea (or several) carefully refined and embodied in some form of gadget, tool, or system to make a real innovation. An idea by itself isn’t much. Think how far the idea of “atoms” have come since the early Greeks. Think how far computing has come since Turing’s paper. And those were two of the most revolutionary ideas in history – the 99% perspiration is probably an underestimate.
Obviously, I associate “innovation” with technology, rather than pure science or art, though I have no doubt that the notion of an idea needing serious thought, development, and experimentation to become more than “just a good idea” applies universally.
2. Who are your favorite innovators?
OK, let’s get back to earth and look at ideas and innovations of a more manageable magnitude. Consider the relatively few and simple ideas that became Unix, such as “have each program do one thing well and combine them using streams of characters”. The Unix pioneers, McIlroy, Thompson, Ritchie, Aho, Kernighan, Feldman, Morris, and many more created a system and a set of related ideas and tools that live on today inside most of our software based systems.
3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
That’s hard to say. As a rule of thumb, a major success exists in embryonic form 15 years before it becomes a major success. The one with the most ramifications to programming and software systems is multi-cores. We now have to get serious about quite fine grained concurrency, and we have never been very good at that.
I have a camera, a cell phone, an MP3 player, and a laptop. It is obvious that some synthesis of these three will happen. We see it happening: last week someone in Amsterdam showed me a talk I gave in Canada in August on his iPod. I want such a gadget that is good at each of the tasks, rather than just a compromise that is mediocre at each and relatively large. For example, as long as a camera phone features 3Mpixels and a lousy lens, it’s unacceptable as a camera.
These two examples are huge. They are not individual innovations but sums of many and drivers of further innovation. Design – aesthetic concerns – will be important. I’m very keen on solid, functional, and beautiful designs. A beautiful and functional system contains innumerable small innovations and refinements. These are easy to overlook because they so quickly become taken for granted. For example, for decades, shower-curtain rods were straight, running parallel with the rim of the shower area to ensure than water didn’t splash out. This led to most people – literally – having too little elbow room until some genius though of having the rod curve outwards. Brilliant! Water that splashes out is caught be the curtain and runs back into the tub – and life is just a little bit better for a few hundred million people.
4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?
A solid technical education, a sense what is practical, persistence, impatience with dogma, a willingness to take (calculated) risks. In many cases, an aesthetic sense that deems existing solutions inadequate and guides innovation. You can’t innovate in the abstract, every innovation is a response to problems.
I think idealism often plays a part. Individuals who are just out for themselves are too easily diverted in short-term money-making schemes or corporate climbing.
5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
To be an innovator in a technological field, you have to have a serious technical education and work hard at developing your ideas. You become a “geek”. That’s great and often involves desirable personal traits, such as trustworthiness, stamina, and a skeptical attitude towards unproven ideas in general. Unfortunately, those are not universally appreciated traits – especially among technophobes – so it can carry a social cost. You must also devote serious time and effort to “technical details” that are often not appreciated by managers or people in general – even if their lives or livelihood depend on them. On the other hand, survey after survey have shown engineers to be among the most stable and satisfied groups in society, so maybe the negative aspects are overrated.
6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
Satisfaction of having made a positive contribution to the world, and sometimes status and wealth. Most of the successful innovators I have met also built up a network of friends and colleagues that can sustain them for life. I think that the “lone wolf” image of an innovator is misleading. Many of the most successful innovators are at the center of a network of exceptional people.
7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
Curiosity, persistence, and – of course – luck.
8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Get a good degree in a technical subject – science or engineering – and then get a bit of practical experience trying to put ideas into working products. Also exposure to an aesthetic field, such as literature, architecture, furniture design, image composition.
9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
That’s harder than it appears. Most cultures highly value and encourage regularity, predictability, providing the right answer to conventional questions, respect of authority, not wasting time on “extraneous matters”, etc. This is especially true in educational settings. Major innovation more often arise from asking unconventional questions and working hard to find elegant answers.
We need to tolerate and encourage people to “take a walk in the forest” (as A.G. Bell expressed it) repeatedly in their education and career. We are too keen on giving people well-specified tasks and having them set definite short-to-medium-term goals. Sometimes, there has to room to do a task, a project, a course “just for fun”, etc., and there must be rewards for coming up with something unusual. A culture goes stale fast if the greatest awards typically go to people who never take a chance and never look up from assigned tasks.
10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Lots of specific tasks; tight deadlines. Lack of general direction; lack of deadlines. Lack of rewards, trivial rewards. Emphasis on huge, life altering, monetary awards for the very few. Emphasis on individuals moving from technical work into management.
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br />10+1. Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?
I think I have seen it done. In Bell Labs technical managers and senior researcher often spend serious time Mentoring a new researcher. I think “innovation” is more suited to one-to-one discussions than to courses; also, what is required successful innovation in one field and in one company isn’t necessarily the same as is required elsewhere in industry or in academia. The selection of a mix of topics to work on – such as, short-term, long-term, risky, and low-hanging fruit – can be crucial. I doubt that the more personal aspects of innovation, such as calculated risk taking, perseverance, and curiosity can be taught, at least not to adults.
Here is an interesting information. As you may know, after a long period of no activity some work on standards for Object Database Systems resumed under the umbrella of the Object Management Group (OMG).
For those of you who are interested in standards, and willing to actively participate in such activites, here is an opportunity:
I have received this note from Mike Card:
“The OMG is hosting an Object Database Technologies Users and Vendors Roundtable in Burlingame, CA at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport on Tuesday morning, December 11th 2007.
I will provide an update with the exact start time and the name of the ballroom/ conference room where the round-table will be held as the date gets closer.
The purpose of this meeting will be to get industry and user reaction to the work done so far by the OMG Object Database Technology Working Group (ODBTWG). Our group has been investigating the research done by
Prof. Kazimierz Subieta of the Polish Japanese Institute for Information Technology in Warsaw, Poland. Prof. Subieta’s team has come up with a so-called
Stack-Based Architecture (SBA) for defining the contents of an object database and the semantics of an abstract stack-based query processor and its associated query language (SBQL). Their work is the object equivalent of the relational calculus in that it provides a precisely-defined, semantically complete set of definitions of what objects are, how they are
stored and how they can be queried. We would like to base any future object database standard on the object model he has developed so that the language bindings, query languages, etc. that follow are well-defined, self-consistent, and complete. Doing this would address many of the criticisms leveled at the earlier ODMG standards.
The ODBTWG has prepared a white paper on our approach to future object database standardization and our incorporation of Prof. Subieta’s ideas which you can download from: ODBMS.ORG
Prof. Subieta will be in attendance at this meeting and we will have him give an overview and brief demonstration of his work, concrete implementations of which have been built for various EU projects.
We will then open the discussion up to all participants, we are especially eager to hear thoughts from object database vendors about Prof. Subieta’s ideas and to explain how we think his ideas could be incorporated into future object database standards. We would welcome discussions on what future object database standards should or should not look like, open-source collaborative projects such as reference implementations or conformance test suites, trends in the object database marketplace, etc. In short, we are seeking industry participation and nothing will be off-limits.
If you are interested to attend, there is a $150 registration fee for this event, to register please visit here
There should be a link there soon to register for this event.
Michael P. Card, Syracuse Research Corporation
This time I asked the 10+1 questions to a distinguished database colleague, Hector Garcia-Molina.
Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was the chairman of the Computer Science Department from January 2001 to December 2004. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). From August 1994 to December 1997 he was the Director of the Computer Systems
Laboratory at Stanford. From 1979 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include distributed computing systems, digital libraries and database systems. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974. From Stanford University, Stanford, California, he received in 1975 a MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer
science in 1979. Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; received the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award; is on the Technical Advisory Board of DoCoMo Labs USA, Yahoo Search & Marketplace; is a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle and Kintera.
1. What is “Innovation” for you?
Finding a way to do things better, where “things” can be anything and “better” may means faster, more pleasantly, more accurately, more effectively.
2. Who are your favorite innovators?
Jim Gray is my favorite innovator. He may not be widely known outside the computer science research community, but his work made possible today’s data management systems. He has also been a great mentor to many young scientists.
3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
It takes more than 3 years to know if something really has an impact, so I am struggling to single out three recent innovations.
4. What helps to become a successful innovator?
You have to be a bit of a rebel and quite self confident. Do things differently and pursue your dreams even if people think you are wasting your time.
5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
Not when you are finally successful and recognized. But before you reach that point, you can become poor or ostracized or frustrated.
6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
Financial in some cases, prestige in others, self-satisfaction in other cases, perhaps all three!
7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
Solve a problem or fill a need.
Solve a problem or fill a need.
Solve a problem or fill a need.
8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Get a good education, and if possible spend time at places where innovation is a tradition, so you can see how it is done.
9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
Shine the spotlight less on movie stars, athletes, criminals, and more on people who contribute to society.
10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Not giving people enough freedom to explore things; burdening them with mindless tasks.
10+1. Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?
I do not know how to teach innovation by lecturing or by answering questions like these. The desire to innovate seems to be something one is born with, but it can be enhanced “by example”, that is, by living in an environment that nurtures and incentivizes creativity and innovation.
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I asked 10+1 Questions on Innovation to Hermann-Josef Lamberti, member of the Management Board of Deutsche Bank AG.
See his reply below.
10 +1 Questions On Innovation to: Hermann-Josef Lamberti, Chief Operating Officer, Deutsche Bank AG.
Hermann-Josef Lamberti was appointed a member of the Management Board of Deutsche Bank AG in October 1999.
He is also a member of Deutsche Bank™ Group Executive Committee.
As Chief Operating Officer he has global responsibility for Human Resources, Information Technology, Operations (excluding Securities Settlement according to MaRisk), Cost and Infrastructure Management, Building and Facilities Management as well as Purchasing. He joined Deutsche Bank in 1998 as an Executive Vice President, based in Frankfurt.
Hermann-Josef Lamberti began his professional career in 1982 with Touche Ross in Toronto and subsequently joined Chemical Bank in Frankfurt. From 1985 to 1998 he worked for IBM, initially in Germany in the areas Controlling, Internal Application Development and Sales Banks/Insurance Companies. In 1993, he was appointed General Manager of the Personal Software Division for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at IBM Europe in Paris. In 1995, he moved to IBM in the U.S., where he was Vice President for Marketing and Brand Management. He returned to Germany in 1997 to take up the position of Chairman of the Management of IBM Germany in Stuttgart.
Hermann-Josef Lamberti studied Business Administration in Cologne and Dublin and graduated in 1982 with a master’s degree in Business Administration.
1. What is “Innovation” for you?
Innovation is implemented creativity which adds value. Value could be many things, from tangible or intangible business value for the owners or employees of a company, through to innovations which protect our planet.
In an organisational context, innovation is the lifeblood of an organisation. Successful companies are the ones who can remain agile and reinvent themselves not only to remain top of their game, but also to survive.
2. Who are your favorite innovators?
My favorite innovators are the staff at Deutsche Bank who constantly impress me with their level of creativity.
Innovation is one of five core values at Deutsche Bank, it is something we attach a great deal of importance to, whether it’s product, people, process or management innovation.
Thomas Edison is a good role model for how constant experimentation and failing fast and often allows one to succeed sooner. Edison innovated on innovation, being the first to build an Industrial Research Laboratory, a process for constant innovation. Edison holds 1093 US patents and his businesses live on today in the form of General Electric. A testiment to an innovative culture and business success, GE is one of the original 12 companies to be listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896 and it is the only one to still be listed on this index today.
3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
There are so many to choose from, the pace of change is getting faster. Working in a knowledge industry, I’m interested in Social Networking and the value this can add to an organisation. There is a human need to communicate and interact and a business need to democratise knowledge, to allow it to flow as freely as possible within defined groups. On the internet we’ve all seen the fast growth of Facebook and YouTube, this is a largely untapped area within large organisations.
Another area of innovation which especially benefits those in the developing world is microfinance via mobile phones.
Microfinance is nothing new, as part of our long-standing and wide-ranging commitment to society, Deutsche Bank has been involved in structuring and managing microfinance funds for 10 years (for more information see here).
By combining existing tools, the microfinance loan and the mobile phone, this enables the local microfinance institutions to reach more of the world’s poor to help them with the seed capital to build their own businesses.
4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?
As per Tom Kelley’s book The Ten Faces of Innovation, there are many roles and characteristics required to realise an
innovation. In no particular order, I believe the following are some of the things required to become a successful innovator:
Funding, Supportive Environment (all ideas are good ideas initially, fail with impunity, experiment), Insight (get to the
customer’s unarticulated needs), a good Network, Self-belief, Risk Taker, Persistence, Knowing when to call it a day, Celebrating Success!
5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
There should be some failure & learnings along the road to a successful innovation, then to the victor go the spoils.
6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
The definition of reward is clearly unique to each person, within Deutsche Bank we have internal innovation award programs
to recognise and reward our innovators. In the broader context, I think it’s similar to mountain climbing. It’s hard work, it’s
enjoyable, it’s a challenge, there may be some slips which you get back up from, then the satisfaction and view from the
summit makes it all worthwhile. Some people are wired this way more than others.
7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
Success is in the eye of the beholder, one person’s success can be another person’s loss.
1. Beneficiaries benefits from the innovation (even if not the originally intended value or beneficiary)
2. Stakeholders in the innovation (those who have provided resources) also realise value from the innovation and continue
to provide resources for future innovations
3. The benefits outweigh any negatives (the innovation should be morally and socially responsible)
8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
Go for it. Generate lots of ideas. Expect to fail many times before succeeding. Develop a deep insight into a given area and
experiment. As the bird starts to fly the nest, nuture it, feed it. If it lands on the ground, try again, if it flys, you’re off! Innovating when young is a great time to start as orthodox thinking has not had as much chance to set in.
9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
By setting the behavioural tone from the top.
By visibly recognising and rewarding the behaviour we want to see, encouraging this behaviour in others.
By proving resources and a safe environment.
By connecting the passionate.
Through diverse backgrounds within groups.
Through internal and external networks.
Through story telling and myths.
10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Not doing the above.
10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught?
Yes. Everyone is creative, even people who think they are not.
Everyone has a role to play in realising an innovation.
ODBMS.ORG in numbers…
I am happy to share some numbers for ODBMS.ORG.
ODBMS.ORG is a vendor-independent resource portal with free materials on object database technology and the integration of object-oriented programming and databases. The portal’s goal is to promote and further the use of object databases.
Launched on September 2005, ODBMS.ORG has quickly established itself as the most up-to-date collection of free materials on object database technology on the Internet.
Over the course of its first two years of existence, more than 242,000 visitors have used the site and downloaded 42,645,954 Bandwidth (KB) of resources on object databases such as papers, lecture notes, and software.
Over 32,000 visitors have visited the download section,
18,000 visited the Introduction to ODBMS section,
14,000 visited the Expert section,
8,000 visitors have visited the News section,
13,000 visitors have informed themselves about books,
10,000 visitors have investigated the list of vendors.
ODBMS.ORG was created to serve faculty and students at educational and research institutions as well as OO software developers in the open source community or at commercial companies. It is designed to meet the fast-growing need for resources focusing on object database technology and the integration of object-oriented programming and databases.
All materials and downloads are free.
A Panel of currently 96 internationally recognizable Experts from academia and commercial companies provides the content for this portal.
Thank you to all who contributed and visited the portal.
Roberto V. Zicari
Editor ODBMS.ORG
As I have anticipated, I have published in ODBMS.ORG a white paper on Next-Generation Object Database Standardization written by the OMG`s Object Database Technology Working Group.
It is a very interesting readings!
I asked 10 +1 Questions on Innovation to Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB.
See his reply below.
10 +1 Questions On Innovation to: Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB.
Mårten Mickos joined MySQL AB as CEO in 2001. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a start-up to the second-largest open source company and the fastest-growing database vendor in the world. Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.
1. What is “Innovation” for you?
Some new thing or way of doing things that brings economical
value to a customer.
2. Who are your favorite innovators?
I admire IKEA for innovating the production and distribution process, Apple for innovating usability (mostly from existing
components), and the free and open source software movement for having innovated a great new way to produce and distribute software.
3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
I don’t make such assessments! I’d rather spend time helping innovators than assessing them. I follow Wayne Gretzky’s principle that “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
So I think we should try to get more innovations done, not try to find the top 3. The markets will pass their judgment on the innovations anyhow.
4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?
Curiosity. A meticulous ability to make observations. A desire to contribute. An ability to let go of old thoughts.
Perseverance.
5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
Every passion has its price. Most innovators never hit a home run. But all innovators have to give up something else (mostly time).
6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
I am not an innovator myself, but I believe that the best reward an
innovator can get is to see his or her innovation in productive use.
7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
Frugality, combination, meticulousness.
8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
To start innovating in their everyday life, and to not give up even if it takes years to develop the ability to see new solutions and make them happen.
9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
By making heroes of the innovators.
10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
I believe that the propensity to innovate is fairly stable across the world and over time. But there also needs to be a full set of supporting functions (investors, sales channels, labour market, etc.) and those we can influence.
For instance, I am not sure Silicon Valley is any more innovative on a base level than any other place, but Silicon Valley has all the functions that you need to make an innovation come true.
10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?
I believe there is an amount of passion needed that you cannot teach.
But I think you can wake up a dormant passion for innovation by exposing young people to successful innovators.
This is the principle of “hanging out and drinking beer with Nobel laureates”. It is extremely stimulating.
Also, I think you can teach the techniques of innovation, as well as the skills you will need to bring the innovation to commercial success.
Hope this is useful!
///mgm
I will be shortly publish in ODBMS.ORG a white paper on Next-Generation Object Database Standardization written by the OMG`s Object Database Technology Working Group.
Here is the abstract of the White Paper:
“Following the dissolution of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG) in 2001, standardization efforts for object databases languished. What has emerged since is a fractured marketplace where each vendor has developed a unique set of programming interfaces and features and no truly portable way of interacting with an object database exists. In 2005, the OMG’s Object Database Technology Working Group was formed as the successor to the ODMG, and our first effort has been to create the object equivalent of the relational calculus. We believe that the foundation for this “object calculus” can be found in the research done by Prof. Kazimierz Subieta and his students at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology. We have prepared this white paper to serve as an introduction to Prof. Subieta’s “stack-based architecture” (SBA) and to define the OMG version of it. The definitions and semantics of SBA will, we believe, allow the construction of a complete and correct object model that supports a powerful object query language as well as a complete and correct set of equivalent native programming language bindings. ”
What is the goal of this initiative?
Quoting the white paper: “What we would like to have in the end is a new standard for object databases that is based on a sound theoretical framework with precise and complete definitions. Prof. Subieta’s work is a great starting place because it shows what must be available in an object store in order to support an advanced query language. What we imagine is a new standard which could be fashioned after the ODMG 3.0 specification, something like this:
OMG “Next Generation” Object Database Standard (“ODMG 4.0”)
Chapter 1 – Introductory material
Chapter 2 – New object model based on the abstract store model and an abstract stack-based object query language (AOQL), includes definitions and detailed semantics of all optional features to be standardized
Chapter 3 – XML/XSD specification for data import/export as replacement for “ODL”, provided for all conformance levels
Chapter 4 – Full syntax of abstract query language, provided for all conformance levels
Chapter 5, 6, … – Programming language APIs for specific language bindings
Our new specification would not have to be done in this way, but such an organization would be familiar to those who have used ODMG 3.0 in the past. Of prime importance would be clear definitions and explicit semantics (especially in chapter 2), even including the use of state diagrams or Petri nets as needed to convey the semantics of how certain features are supposed to work in conformant products.
Looking forward, the plan is (assuming there is sufficient vendor interest) for the ODBTWG to prepare (and then issue from its parent task force) one or more RFPs that together will establish the full and complete definitions of the abstract query language (AOQL) and the semantics of the abstract store models, as well as, the semantics and behaviors of optional features (compliance points). This will be the Platform Independent Model (PIM) for a conformant object database. When the PIM is defined, it will serve as the basis for a series of RFPs to develop specifications for concrete implementations of the “Next Generation Object Database” in Java, C++, etc., i.e., Platform Specific Models (PSMs).”
It will be interesting to see if this initiative takes off and if sufficient vendors support it.
I will be writing about it in my next posts.
Roberto V. Zicari
ODBMS where did they go?
September 26, 2007–
If we look back at the history of ODBMS. one sees how when the first generation of ODBMS were introduced, expectations did not really meet reality, notwitstanding all the efforts and enthusiams put on it.
So one asks himself a question. What happened to the ODBMS? Where did they go?
And perhaps a more interesting and actual question is what are the realistic chances for the “new wave” of ODBMS products?
As always, part of the answers can be given by trying to understand the past.
The first wave of ODBMS failed partially because the market conditions were not ready.
In particular, object technology (in particular object oriented languages) were not as diffuse as they are now.
So the issue of “impedence mismatch” between programming languages and databases, was mainly an interesting
academic issue, but not really felt by the market.
I visualize it like a sales person who is trying hard to sell a mini sport convertable car to a family with a number of kids who is not really interested in that…
Things have changed in the meanwhile. Object Oriented Programming Languages (OOP) are widely used.
It is estimated that today we have between 3 and 4 million Java developers. Also, very important in my opinion, for the acceptance of the use of OOP, was the decision of Microsoft to develop Csharp. The Microsoft development world has changed with the introduction of the .NET Framework.
Object Modeling is no more fragmented in several different methodologies like in the early days (the first object-oriented modelling languages began to appear between mid-1970 and the late 1980s, and went up to more than 50 during the period 1989-1994. Most notably Booch, OOSE/Jacobson, OMT).
It has now found a de facto standard, UML. UML is not merely an object modeling software methodology. Many companies are incorporating UML as a standard into their development process and products, which cover disciplines such as business modeling, requirements management, analysis and design, programming, and testing.
UML being a standard has helped the acceptance of OO technology, especially in certain domains.
And relational databases are still there… They changed, yes, but they are still there.
Moreover, new marked opportunities arise. For example, with 1.2 billion cell phones in the world, mobile software development has become a lucrative industry.
So what are the *real* chances for the new generation of ODBMS?
I have decided to work on this issue and try to come up with a reasonable answer. I am planning to collect some relevant information and hopefully this will be assembled in a white paper I am planning to write for December.
In the meanwhile, if you have any input, feedback you wish to give me, there are very welcome!
Roberto V. Zicari
O/R mismatch: What is the Problem?
August 28, 2007
There has been quite a discussion recently on the so called “O/R mismatch”.
This is a quite interesting discussion. The bottom line is that after so many years, still object persistence does not seem to have a fully adequate solution.
This is ackward, bringing programming languages and databases seems still a rather diffcult task…!
There are a number of interesting resources I have recently published on this subject on ODBMS.ORG.
In cooperation with FranklinsNet, ODBMS.ORG has published the transcript of the panel discussion “ORM Smackdown” between Ted Neward and Oren “Ayende” Eini on different viewpoints on Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) systems.
It is an interesting reading. Pls check: ORM Smackdown
I have also published Ted Neward’s follow on essay discussing solutions to the problems
of Object/Relational-Mapping titled “Avoiding the Quagmire”.
This new essay is a follow on to Neward’s “The Vietnam of Computer Science” , which compared
the inherent problems of object/relational mapping to the quagmire in the Vietnam war.
The initial “Vietnam” essay was first published in 2006 and widely discussed in the industry.
“Avoiding the Quagmire” discusses the impact of choosing to integrate object concepts into the database as opposed to using relational concepts or object/relational mappers.
Neward states that while using an object oriented database management system (ODBMS) will not completely eliminate all of the problems described in the intial “Vietnam” essay, it does address some of the more egregious problems. ODBMS thus frequently provide the developer a better chance of avoiding the quagmire and allowing them to focus more clearly on the problem at hand.
Pls check: Avoiding the Quagmire
I published a copy of Ted Neward’s “The Vietnam of Computer Science”.
Neward argues that the O/R mismatch is a quagmire where current approaches including object-relational mappers (ORMs) are subject to decreasing marginal returns. He lists the abandonment of objects (as a programming paradigm) or of relational data structures (as a database paradigm) as the only wholehearted solutions, while living with the pain or full integration of ORMs into languages or databases are other approaches.
I personally do not like the analogy with Vietnam… but the article has a number of interesting points. The article as you may immagine has received a mix feedback from the readers….
Here is the reference: The Vietnam of Computer Science
