ssd@edsr.eds.com (Sean Dowd) (01/17/90)
This is a summary of replies to my request for information on
object-oriented databases. The original posting nquired about OODBs
running in a Sun environment. I didn't specify Sun 3 or 4, since both
were available. The original article also asked if any of these were
public domain and if there were any OO environments integrated with a
relational database. Thanks to all who replied. The summary follows.
DISCLAIMER!!!!!
Please do not blame me if any information in this posting is
inaccurate. It is a compilation of replies to a request for
information. I am only as accurate as my sources. If you find an
error or an omission, feel free to correct and post it. EDS is not
responsible for any information in this posting.
Ontologic (Ontos, formerly VBase, I think) and Serviologic (Gemstone) were
the most frequently mentioned commercially available products. Both have
been in existence for at least 3 years, which is relatively old for this
area. Another possibility brought up was a Symbolics Lisp coprocessor
board which would support Statice OODB. Others mentioned were Object
Design, Objectivity and Object Sciences, all recent startups. Intasca
(formerly Artemis?) is marketing Orion II, which originated at MCC. Sorry,
I don't have any addresses.
Some university projects are also under way.
Name Site/Researcher
=====================================================
Exodus University of Wisconsin, Madison
Dr. David Dewitt & Dr. Michael Carey
dewitt@cs.wisc.edu & carey@cs.wisc.edu
Mneme University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Dr. Eliot Moss
Postgres University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Michael Stonebraker & Dr. Larry Rowe
contact: Sharon Wensel wensel@postgres.UUCP
Observer Brown University
Dr. Stanley Zdonik
There are projects at the University of Arizona, U Texas Austin, U North
Texas and others.
Commercial research efforts are taking place at MCC, DEC, Hewlett-Packard
(IRIS), TI and AT&T. I'm sure there are more.
I was also referred to the recent proceedings of SIGMOD and OOPSLA
conferences. Both were sponsored by the ACM. They are:
[OODB86] Proceedings of the International Workshop on Object
Oriented Database Systems, Pacific Grove, CA, September
1986. ACM. (SIGMOD)
ISBN 0-8186-0734-3 Library of Congress #86-45866.
[OODB88] K. R. Dittrich, ed., Advances in Object-Oriented
Database Systems. Heidelberg, West Germany:
Springer-Verlag, 1988.
I also requested information on O-O environments integrated with
relational databases. I am aware of 2 commercially available products,
KEE from Intellicorp and Mercury KBE from Artificial Intelligence
Technologies. Both are expert system production environments based on
object systems integrated with relational SQL databases. I also heard
about a product called REFINE from Reasoning Systems in San Jose, which is
a reverse engineering workbench. I'm pretty sure all of these are
Lisp-based CLOS systems. I don't know if REFINE is commercially available
yet either. Mercury was originally developed on a Vax and is
currently being ported to Suns. The addresses are:
Artificial Intelligence Technologies
40 Saw Mill River Road
Hawthorne, NY 10532
914-347-6860
Intellicorp
1975 El Camino Real West
Mountain View, CA 94040
415-965-5650
Reasoning Systems
3260 Hillview Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94304
415-494-8053.
Brian Skinner at Lighthouse Design added the following about a project
on the NeXT machine which
translates specification files into objective-C source. The
specification files are similar to objective-C source files, but
are tailored toward entity-relationship style specifications.
These files can be used as a means of specifying the structure
and behavior of classes that act like standard objective-C
classes, except that their instances persist between program
invocations. These classes dynamically create and free
instances as they are needed by other parts of the application,
and handle all of the access to the database. The programmer
need not worry about how this persistence is achieved, and is
free to work on application specific code.
He can be contacted at ...!uunet!lighthouse!skinner.
Please post all replies.