Future of DBMS's

[chrisgreen]

Just wanted your opinion on the future of DBMS's.

At the moment I would argue that relational DBMS's are the state of the art.

Do you think that object relational DBMS' will take over or do you think that vendors will simply provide add ons to their RDBMS', that will provide facilities like data mining, multimedia retrieval etc..

I would love to hear your opinions and if you know of a web site that I would be interested, I would be very grateful.

Thanks alot.

Chris Green cjgreen36@hotmail.com

 

[2ffat]

A couple of years ago, this idea came up in the media. O2, Jasmine, Poet, and several other OODBM/ORDBMs (Object-oriented data base management systems / Object-relational data base management systems) came out and began to be popular. Big companies like Oracle, Sybase, and Informix were going through some rough times financially. The media said that RDMBS were passe' and nobody was developing a major project using RDBMs.

About that time we had some integrators working for us that tried to push us on the idea of using OODBMS/ORDBMS. Their reasoning was that since they were using Java to code, the OODBMS/ORDBMS would just "plop" into place with an OO langauge. Unfortunately, it didn't work that way. These DBMS were slow and if you tried to configure them for something that didn't fit the OO model exactly, you had a devil of a time to get them to work. On top of that, they just weren't "mature" enough to have all the bugs worked out. Many of the companies were small and just didn't have the funds necessary to debug their DBs, either.

The result, we had to drop the integrators because they could not produce the software product we needed in time. They went over the deadline by a year and were still several years away from competing the project.

My take, IMHO, is OODBMS are better than ORDBMS and they work OK for web applications but for "real-world" needs, they won't work (YET). Add to this the advancements done to RDBMS in the past few years and you have a stituation where RDBMS are still "King" and will be for awhile. If a company can produce an OODBMS or ORDBMS that is as reliable, fast, and "standard compliant" (SQL-like) as most RDBMS, then OODBMS/ORDBMS may take off. Until then...
James P. Cottingham

http://www.ivcusa.com

 

[Kenrae]

There's something you are missing. Oracle and Informix are ORDBMS by now, not RDBMS. I think this will be the most used standard in the near future.
By the way, OODBMS will be used with design applications (say, a case tool like Rational Rose) and ORDBMS with management applications... which are the majority.
Then, ORDBMS will be the most used, but OODBMS won't dissapear.