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Object Oriented Database vs Relational Database

QUALCOMM
(Telecommunications)

QUALCOMM, Inc., San Diego, CA, is a leader in digital wireless communications technologies. The company manufactures, markets, licenses and operates advanced communications systems and products based on digital wireless technology. QUALCOMM had revenues of $107.5 million in the fiscal year ending September, 1992. Publicly traded since December 1991, its stock trades on the NASDAQ National Market System, symbol: QCOM. Founded 1985. Over 900 personnel are located at the company's San Diego headquarters and throughout the United States. Products and Technologies include OmniTRACS System, the most technologically advanced two-way mobile satellite communications and tracking system of its kind in the world. Introduced in late 1988, the OmniTRACS * Osystem provides data transmission and position reporting services for over 225 transportation companies and other mobile customers using more than 43,000 OmniTRACS terminals in the United States and Canada. The system also operates in Europe and service is planned to begin in Japan, Mexico and Brazil in 1993. CDMA, QUALCOMM's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) is a next-generation technology for digital wireless telephone communications. CDMA improves voice quality and increases capacity by as much as 10 to 20 times over today's FM analog cellular system. CDMA uses spread spectrum technology to break up speech into small, digitized segments and encode them to identify each call. A large number of users can thus share the same band of spectrum and greatly increase system capacity. Commercial deployment of CDMA cellular systems will began in several U.S. cities in early 1994. A North American standard based on QUALCOMM's CDMA technology was adopted in 1993 for the rapidly growing cellular telephone industry. Under development through a joint venture between QUALCOMM and Loral Aerospace Corporation, Globalstar is a low -earth orbit (LEO) satellite-based, c ellular-like voice and data service for mobile or fixed applications. Globalstar will be designed to provide affordable and reliable voice, data, fax and position location services to customers around the globe. QUALCOMM's government products include Data Link Systems for government test and training ranges, and the QM6100 Universal Compatible Modem for Defense Satellite Communications System.

QUALCOMM's industry leading CDMA technology supports digital, wireless communications systems. The base stations that support all communications, routing of messages, voice, data, images, dynamic rerouting, etc., are based on Objectivity/DB. These have been licensed to Nortel, Ottawa, CA, the largest broadband telecommunications vendor in the USA, who is extending the system and installing it for Sprint in a $2B contract.

Base Station Manager (GDMO in ODBMS)

The International standard (ITU X.700 series) for managing telecommunication networks, General Definition of Managed Objects (GDMO), is written in terms of objects. QUALCOMM found they could implement these directly as objects, which could send messages to each other, to accomplish the dynamic management of the network. This model is naturally a network of related objects (1:many, many:many), in which the ODBMS bidirectional relationships were far faster and easier. Also, mapping from their C++ language to the RDBMS cost an additional layer of complexity, slowed down the system, and dramatically increased the cost of maintenance, due to the need to change this mapping and the underlying RDBMS. Also, the RDBMS lacked inheritance, which is used heavily in the model, and which allows extending the system easily by adding new (sub-) types of network elements. The ODBMS, they found, provided the necessary distributed single-logical view over all the base stations and the full network. Further, it allowed the programming model of objects to be directly represented as ODBMS objects, easy implementation, maintenance, and improving performance. Other advantages include support for versioning and scalability, plus proven success in 24x7 production use.