Object databases and the Web: a dream team? - includes related article on popularity of the Web among ODBMS vendors - Internet/Web/Online Service Information

Software Magazine, Oct, 1996 by Barbara Francett

Real-world relationships -- business and personal -- are complex, colorful, certainly interactive and often unstructured. While object databases offer the ability to mimic these complex relationships, they have been relegated to niche applications by their more widespread relational counterparts. Now, however, the Internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, may be looming as the long-awaited "killer app" for object databases.

The Web, widely deemed the multimedia platform and authoring/publishing tool of the future, is inherently object in nature. With its emphasis on graphics, multimedia data types and complex data relationships, the Web defies the row-and-column structure of the relational model. "The Web is by nature complex, with interrelated data. This gives object databases an edge," says Mitch Kramer, a consulting editor with Boston-based consultancy Patricia Seybold Group Inc.

And object databases, combined with the accessibility of the Internet and capabilities of the Web, are giving businesses a competitive edge. Alliance Interactive Corp. in Toronto, for example, says its dynamic, Web-based home furnishings application, based on the Versant object database from Versant Object Technology, Menlo Park, Calif., puts it ahead of the competition. "The Web aspect is a selling point," says Mike Ashton, managing partner. "The system puts us one generation ahead because everybody else is putting up static pages. This is more complicated."

Alliance Interactive chose an object database for its Visrad system because of the complex nature of the data. The system's three main components are the database itself, a high-speed compositing engine and a GUI interface. The database's schema of complex relationships mandated the use of objects.

"It was most important that we could design object classes that mimic real-world relationships," Ashton says. "For example, we have a color object that represents color relationships and how colors coordinate." A Visrad user can select a product, such as a particular color and style of bedspread, and the system will choose coordinating wallpaper and curtains to go with it -- in the user's designated price range.

"We came up with the idea for this application six years ago," says Ashton, "but the equipment and technology weren't there." Alliance Interactive began developing Visrad about two years ago.

Originally, Alliance Interactive designed Visrad as a kiosk system for manufacturers and retailers and for decorators' laptops. "Then the Web became popular, and we changed our plans dramatically," Ashton says.

The company is now running demos of the system for its potential clients, but over the next year or so, it will scale up to 20,000 to 40,000 products in the database, Ashton says. In addition to home furnishings, Alliance Interactive is creating similar demos for fashions and cosmetics. "We are getting great response in negotiations with potential clients," Ashton says.

Alliance Interactive can host Visrad to an existing Web site or install it as a new one. Future plans, Ashton says, include adding 3-D technology using VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language). "It's just another data type," he says, although he acknowledges that it may be another three years before Visrad clients have their products available for storage in a 3-D format.

Today, most of the leading-edge users combining object databases and the Internet are ISVs. However, given the hectic pace of all things Web-related, it's doubtful that will be the case for long.

Still, object databases will have to compete with their far more entrenched relational counterparts for the management of complex data types. "Unstructured data types are hard to fit into relational databases, although people are still trying to because they have relational systems and are used to them," says Kramer of the Patricia Seybold Group.

"Support for new data types is reinforced by the Web because of its multimedia content and hypertext nature," says Steve McClure, director of object tools at International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass. As a result, he says, relational database vendors are moving to object technology to store and manage these new data types, using object programming languages to define them and how they should be processed.

"Where relational databases won't encroach [on object databases] is in [applications with] complex, many-to-many, data relationships," McClure says. Object databases, with their tree-like structures, excel at managing complex data relationships. Similarly, Web pages also have a complex internal structure, with hyperlinks between pages for navigating the relationships between pages. Conversely, row-and-column-based relational databases, which arrange data in tables, have to make numerous joins in order to link related data.

"Object databases handle these [applications] because every object has an identifier and can point to that identifier," McClure says. "Relational databases are stuck with tables."

Jeff Vogel, co-founder and director of engineering at Electronic Book Technologies (EBT) Inc., Providence, R.I., agrees. Two years ago, the company began developing DynaBase, a document management system with incremental indexing, version control and multi-user capability. The system features a "smart repository" that stores only the changes between document versions, rather than multiple versions of the original and its alters.