discussion 1: Lia

Re: Topic 7 DQ 1

I agree with the author that object-oriented database is a niche market, for a few reasons. The growth rates for relational databases are expected to be significantly higher than OO databases. In 1999, the sales revenue of $11.1 billion for relational and object-relational databases, but only $211 million for OO databases. “Whatever Happened to Object-Oriented Databases” states that “sales of relational databases have grown considerably faster than the sales of OO databases, and annual worldwide RDBMS revenues are now about 50 times larger” (n.d., Leavitt Communications). RDBMs are significantly more successful, and have more money and marketing clout to continue to grow.

Object oriented market isn’t as big as RDBMS, however they can aid in areas where RDBMSs are not well suited. OO databases are best suited for use with applications that manage complex relationships among data objects. They are useful with artificial intelligence and computer aided design and manufacturing applications. Hospital patient care tracking systems use OO databases. However, they don’t compare to high transaction volumes and user counts necessary for business purposes as well as relational databases. OO systems don’t have a competitive advantage for traditional business data processing applications that require high performance, reliability, and scalability. It is cheaper for businesses to continue to use their relational database than switch. RDBMs have more money and marketing clout.

Source:

Whatever happened to OBECT-oriented databases? Leavitt Communications An International Public Relations Agency. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2021, from http://leavcom.com/articles/db_08_00.htm.

discussion2:

Sunil Lakhanpal

Re: Topic 7 DQ 1

Yes, I agree with the article author that object-oriented databases technology is on the emerge and is a niche market. Object Oriented databases never got out of a niche market. They are good for some applications – where the data structure lends itself to being represented by an object graph – but never held the compelling advantage over a RDBMS to cross the chasm. The key advantage touted for OODBMS products is the tight integration to the host language – there is no object/relational impedance mismatch.

The OODBMS organizes and models data as a definable data object as opposed to an alphanumeric value. Programmers using OODBMS can enjoy the consistency in the programming environment as it is integrated and uses the same representation model with the programming languages. Additionally, the OODBMS has a representation of the complex structure that allows the creation of a more realistic model, better performance, and flexibility.

There are several organizations that are using the OODBMS at a large scale such as Chicago Stock Exchange, Radio Computing Services, Motorola in The Iridium System, South-West Airline’s Home Gate, Gemstone, Versant or Cardinal who are doing quite nicely with their products. The technology is useful for some types of data structures and can be more efficient than a RDBMS but tends to be weak for ad-hoc queries compared to modern SQL dialects.

And ObjectStore, GemStone, ObjectDB, ODABA and ObjectDatabase++ are some of the top object databases in the market

Reference:

Shukla, D., Singh, N., Jagudaniya, N., & Nirmal, A. (2015). Empirical Performance Comparison of OODBMS over RDBMS. structure, 7(1).

discussion3: Mentor

Sowter (2018), defined niche market as a segment of a larger market that you can define through its unique needs, preferences, or identity. Therefore, a niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. The market niche defines the product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that it is intended to target.

Based on the article read, I would mentioned that OO databases have not become major players in the database market in reference to its financial records over time. This does not imply OO databases are not a major player. Perhaps, the use of complex data changed or companies can no longer afford OO databases. Moreover, they do have niche markets because they do handle complex objects particularly well, they can manage complex data relationships effectively. OO databases are thus popular in the areas of artificial intelligence and computer-aided design and manufacturing applications, which entail complex data relationships. Example, banks like J.P. Morgan, Chase and Citibank are using ODBMS technologies in modeling financial instruments such as derivatives and bonds.

Furthermore, Object Oriented databases aren’t really in fashion at the moment. Relational Databases are by far the most popular with NoSQL also making some waves. Several technical issues have led to OO databases’ limited strength in the database marketplace. Performance: OO databases can store data sets in their entirety and thus typically run faster than relational databases, which must break data sets into parts for storage within tables and then reassemble them in response to queries. However, relational databases have reduced OO databases’ performance advantage with improved optimizers. The optimizers improve ways of finding information within relational databases’ tables and indices. Relational databases are good for managing large amounts of structured, alphanumerical data. For example, companies use them to maintain records of transactions or personnel files. An OO database-management system (ODBMS) supports the modeling and creation of data as objects. Users can support new media types with OO databases simply by creating new objects. With OO databases, the application and the database use exactly the same object model.

Reference

Sowter, C. V. (2018). Marketing high technology services. Routledge.