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Table of contents:

Object Oriented Database vs Relational Database

• Introduction
• The Wall: Where an RDBMS breaks down
• Programming Time and Cost
• Integrity Loss
• Performance
• Information Model Issues
• Architecture Issues
• Benchmark
• Benchmark Parameters
• Benchmark Execution
• Parts Creation
• Updates
• Deletes
• Selects
• Summary
• Examples
• Cimskil (Manufacturing)
• Exxon (Configuration and FEA)
• CERN (Data Gathering and Analysis)
• Decision•ism (Decision Supportware)
• QUALCOMM (Telecommunications)
• COM21 (Cable Modem)
• Nortel, Sprint (Cell Phone Base Station Management)
• Nousoft (Library Document Management, Web)
• Iridium (Telecommunications)
• BBN (Military Logistics and Control)
• Intraspect (Knowledge Management)
• Fisher-Rosemount (Manufacturing, Process Control)
• A Brief Overview of Our Development
• ODB Selection
• Introduction
• Performance
• Scalability
• Productivity
• Fault Tolerance
• Additional Features and Benefits
• Summary
• Kintetsu (Transportation, Logistics)
• Siemens (Process Control)
• SEH (Semiconductor Manufacturing)
• NEC (Semiconductor Manufacturing)
• American Meter (Process Control)
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey (Geographic Information System)
• LMS (Healthcare, Fetal Monitoring)
• Synthesis (Healthcare, Record Management)
• Daikin (Multi-Media CD-I Authoring)
• How to Avoid the Wall

Object Oriented Database vs Relational Database

Synthesis
(Healthcare, Record Management)

The Synthesis application is Electronic Medical Record (EMRx). It is a repository for medical documents with a powerful search and retrieval capability based upon keywords, synonym, and word proximity. The target market is health care initially, but the technology is general enough to be applied in many different domains.

The following two critical capabilities were key in determining the choice of ODBMS:

Scalability: Maintaining adequate performance under high volumes of data was one of the most critical factors in determining project success and acceptance as a viable solution in the marketplace.

Flexibility: EMRx's sophisticated search engine required storage of complicated data structure. Retrieval and usage of this data in a high performance manner was critical to project success.

Other important criteria influenced the choice of ODBMS over (O)RDBMS, and the choice of particular ODBMS:

Distributed Architecture: Objectivity's distributed architecture was seen as the only way to meet their scalability and performance requirements. Other architectures forced a central server bottleneck that limited the system's scalability. The transparency of the distributed architecture to the application was another big plus.

Container Flexibility: Application-defined locking and clustering through the use of containers gave their designers much flexibility in implementation options and performance trade-offs based on their problem domain.

Scopeable Indexes: The ability to create and use scoped indexes was very important to maintaining high performance. Higher level algorithms could narrow searches down to a portion of the database, and then use scoped indexes to finish the query. Other databases only supported global indexes, which became too large and slow to use effectively (indexes of all documents in their repository vs. documents that were of a c ertain category).