moiram@tekcae.CAX.TEK.COM (Moira Mallison) (06/08/90)
Does anyone have experiences to relate in using Ingres Corporation's Object Management System? I've read some of the Postgres Papers, and I saw slides from a talk given by an Ingres Corp employee, which looked remarkably similar to a presentation I've seen Mike Stonebraker give. Alas, the topic of the workshop was "Databases Today and Tomorrow" and I only saw copies of the slides, I didn't attend. So, a large part of my question is how much is today and how much is tomorrow? If we were to do some proto-typing in Postgres, how easily would it port to OMS? Moira Mallison CAX Data Management Tektronix, Inc
bg0l+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bruce E. Golightly) (06/08/90)
I haven't had my hands on it yet, but I have a bit more information. There were a number of presentations on the OO extension at the North American Ingres Users Association meeting in Salt Lake CIty at the beginning of May. They were a mix of Ingres Corp staffers and external developers. If memory serves, somebody from the Palmer Group did one of the presentations. Impressions: - Look for a steep learning curve on this. The creator of the data type or object is going to have to assume responsibility for developing operator/functions to manipulate it. This is going to be especially hairy at the start. There should be "commerical", "standard" types available after a while. As an Example, if you define/create a data type used to refer to latitude and longitude, your work is not done. You also assume responsibility for creating a function to over-load things like the addition operator, so the dbms can figure out what something like location+100 miles means. Ingres Corp clearly cannot take on the burden of supporting user defined types, operators and function. - The object oriented extensions are quite broad. They are, in fact, user defined data types. This allows almost anything to be defined as a new data type, and manipulated as an object thereafter. Things like graphics objects, location (latitude and longitude), weight temperature, etc. may become candidates for storage in the dbms. I've got a couple of things I'd like to try this on when I get the extensions and the time to play with them.