Universal truths - Industry Trend or Event - Editorial - Brief Article

Software Magazine, May, 1997 by Patrick L. Porter

When the first object-oriented database companies appeared on the scene nearly a decade ago, their more foolhardy backers said they were in the vanguard of a revolution that would one day topple the relational database companies from their perch atop the industry.

After many years and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital investment, object-oriented databases have managed to carve out a small niche in engineering design shops and in the entertainment industry. For the most part, however, they remain something of a novelty.

That doesn't mean corporate IS departments are uninterested in object technology. On the contrary, distributed object technology seems finally to have come of age. Both the Object Management Group and the Open Group are playing important roles in establishing reliable infrastructures and roadmaps that will enable customers and vendors alike to develop and deploy a bevy of object-based technologies and applications.

By some accounts, the data that will ultimately be contained in objects will dwarf the traditional alphanumeric SQL data that is used in most business applications today. However, despite the revolutionary potential of object technology, we don't expect to see any Fortune 500 companies chucking their SQL databases anytime soon. On the contrary, IS shops grappling with objects seem most interested in how they can integrate the new technology into their existing databases and applications. Big-budget customers are inherently evolutionary when it comes to buying new systems. They have too much at stake to jump into every new technology that comes down the pike.

That's why IBM, Oracle and Informix are offering customers a measured approach to incorporating objects into their data. Each has unveiled a universal server -- a database that handles alphanumeric data types as well as objects, which it decomposes into 'buckets of bits' and stores like SQL data.

The market for universal servers may still be tiny, but we think more IS managers are going to be evaluating them in the coming year. Turn to page 36 for our take on the industry's current crop of universal servers, and a heads-up on some new technology just around the corner.