Of Objects and Databases: A Decade of Turmoil
Michael J. Carey, David J. DeWitt · 1996
A decade ago, the connection between ob-jects and databases was new and was be-ing explored in a number of different ways within our community. Driven by the per-ception that managing traditional business data was largely a solved problem, projects were investigating ideas such as adding ab-stract data types to relational databases and building extensible database systems, object-oriented database systems, and toolkits for constructing special-purpose database sys-tems. In addition, work was underway else-where in the computer science research com-munity on extending programming languages with database-inspired features such as persis-tence and transactions. In this paper, we take a look at where our field was a decade ago and where it is now in terms of database support for objects (and vice versa). We look both at research projects and at commercial database products. We share our vision and our biases about the fu-ture of objects and databases, and we identify a number of research challenges that remain to be addressed in order to ultimately achieve our vision.