Object databases and where they’re at
Dr. Dobb’s Journal reports from OOPSLA conference’s panel Objects and Databases: The State of the Union in 2006, where the participants talk on the status quo of the object database world. The statement from Bob Walker of Gemstone Systems is pretty interesting:
What we found since we’re already doing transparent access to objects without having to do anything other than to say “Wait or I want an egg” and the egg is still there. I think that problem has been solved in terms of OR mapping or impedance mismatch, I like your analogy, I think that is very good. I think the next step and from what I’m hearing from programmers, I hear things like “I just want my objects. I just want them here and I want them now and I don’t want to have to mess with it, I just want them there, I don’t want to have to deal with the database, I want all that stuff taken care of for me.” I think the next step, and I think we’re seeing this at Gemstone, is what basically is a distributed in-memory live object cache that has transactional attributes but it doesn’t deal with disk space storage what so ever. I think, five years from now, we are going to memory cheap enough and fast enough that there won’t be any discs. There will simply be in memory objects, ubiquitous throughout the enterprise, a robust sea of objects always available for the programmer. They don’t have to mess with OR mapping, they don’t have to mess with object databases, they don’t have to mess with SQL, the objects are just there ready for the taking and for the use.
There’s also an article in Dr. Dobb’s on an open source object database engine:
db4o, an open-source object database for embedded Java and .NET applications, is promising a significant performance and memory improvement in a new release.