November 29, 1999, Issue: 763
Section: Application Development Java Messaging
Object Databases Move To The Middle -- Despite The Prevalence Of Relational Databases, Vendors Are Making Use Of The Technology
Mary Stearns Sgiaroto
The market tug-of-war between object-oriented and relational databases is long over, and it's clear that relational databases remain the chief custodians of business information. Object-database technology has always had a lot of gee-whiz value, but most vendors have had difficulty making big money with it. Merv Adrian, VP at Giga Information Group, says, "It's a zero-billion-dollar market, and will remain one for some time to come."
But object databases are hardly extinct. Rather than fight a losing battle on the back end, vendors are finding new ways to exploit this technology on the middle tier. For the past 10 to 15 years, according to Gartner Group's Sanjeev Varma, object-oriented database-management system vendors competing on the database tier have not proven especially successful. "In certain niches there is a lot of value to this technology; it's just that those niches aren't that big," Varma says.
According to John Singer, program director for application delivery strategies at Meta Group, object databases are finding a comfortable home as code repositories within more-specialized servers. "While the highly granular nature of Web site visual components seem to be a natural fit for object-oriented database-management systems, we see the technology primarily as infrastructure embedded within other solutions," Singer says. "Object-oriented database-management products are evolving towards Java application servers, persistence managers, and XML interchange as a means of adding value above the basic database functionality."
Java's importance to object databases should not be underestimated. Says George Franzen, chief technology officer of Versant Corp., "With the emergence of Java, many companies are looking to augment their infrastructure. The business-to-business consumer wants seamless integration using midtier technology involving objects and Java."
Franzen cites middleware as a key component of a scalable transactional system. "Using an object-oriented database is the easiest way to build applications," he says. "The database supports transactional activity added into the middle tier without creating a new, uncontrolled workload for the existing enterprise system."
Startup iVendor Inc. embeds Versant's object-oriented database-management system into its end-to-end E-commerce services, offering an all-Java, turnkey E-merchandising network. "One of the most important components is the database," says Kee Ong, president and CEO of iVendor. "It contains all the catalog information about the products and suppliers." Storing products as objects is ideal, because it gives iVendor the flexibility to let different stores offer the same items at different prices.
Relational-database technology made little sense for Ong's service offerings. "If we use the relational model, the performance would kill us," he says. "It would be 10 times slower."
Cybergrrl Inc. in New York builds relationships with its Generation-X female community through a midsize Web site dedicated to encouraging women and girls to embrace technology and make it part of their everyday lives. With 3 million impressions and 350,000 to 500,000 unique visits per month, Cybergrrl is an iVendor beta partner and will soon launch iVendor's E-commerce back end.
CEO Kevin Kennedy co-founded Cybergrrl with president Aliza "Cybergrrl" Sherman in 1995. With iVendor, Cybergrrl has the same buying power as a larger site, Kennedy says. "It allows us price flexibility. It makes Cybergrrl competitive with Amazon.com or CDnow.com from a pricing perspective."
Kennedy also likes being freed from having to handle many of the post-transactional details. "IVendor provides its database to us," he says, "and we can merchandise products within our content." Cybergrrl then becomes the vendor of record, while iVendor takes care of online credit-card processing, shipping and packing, and customer service.
As more companies realize the benefits of the Extensible Markup Language, vendors are finding new ways to approach this market, and companies are seeing definite benefits to deploying object databases at the hub of their integration projects. The XML trend will continue to shake itself out, of course. Says Gartner Group's Varma, "Most everybody has a story about managing in-memory data and XML. It's very early in the XML game and it's still too early for anybody to claim victory or defeat."
Hoping to end up on the winning side, Object Design Inc. in Burlington Mass., was founded on an object-database product, ObjectStore, and has positioned itself squarely in the XML space. The company sells eXcelon, a midtier, XML-based data-integration server that manages the flow of information between IT systems, business-to-consumer applications, and business-to-business information exchange applications.
"I think XML is going to explode," says Coco Jaenicke, manager of product marketing and XML evangelist for Object Design. "I think it's going to be the underlying format for all information. Technically, XML has every feature you need; it stands up to the job. And the industry is supporting it, so it's free of political perils."
XML and object databases would seem to be a potent combination. David Hoag, VP of development at Java engineering and consulting firm ObjectWave, says object-oriented database-management system technology is superior when it comes to storing XML.
"The component model for XML is complex enough that to store it in a relational database isn't practical," Hoag says. "In the relational-database world, you have to worry about foreign key references, the depth of the model. There is a lot more complexity in mapping an XML component model to a relational model." Mapping an XML component model to a relational database requires hundreds and hundreds of round trips, Hoag says, whereas the object database simply returns the object structure. "In an XML situation, the object database will win out in performance and simplicity," he says.
Other object-database technology is greener still, at least in that it is being recycled and used in new ways. Fresher Information Corp. provides "outsourced content infrastructure," information aggregation and search services that Web sites can buy or co-brand. After acquiring the object-oriented Matisse technology, Fresher has incorporated the now proprietary database into its Web solutions. Fresher is being employed by NetNoir Inc., the owner of NetNoir.com, an African-American community-resource portal in which America Online has a 20% stake.
NetNoir, in San Francisco, needed a fast internal search engine to handle a high number of requests, so it outsourced to Fresher. Says E. David Ellington, CEO and president of NetNoir, "Our search engine is very fast. Fresher technology is best of breed-no one else could do it so quickly and so efficiently. It's a great customer experience."
In the past, companies had difficulty creating Web sites quickly enough. "Today, the challenge is that too much information is coming in," says Scott Rafer, Fresher's president and CEO. According to Rafer, Fresher's object-oriented technology handles indexing tasks in 90 seconds or less.
Despite the importance of the Web as a driver for object-database technology, object-oriented database-management systems still have a home in more-traditional environments. A major design initiative launched by the U.S. Navy is a case in point.
Trident Systems Group Inc. in Fairfax, Va., is a systems-engineering company with 15 years' experience in the design and development of large and complex projects. It uses Interchange, a design database Trident developed based on Computer Associates' Jasmine for Navy project DD21, the next generation of land attack destroyers under development.
Trident is part of one of two industry teams vying for the $60 billion project. Trident's team includes Boeing, Ingalls Shipbuilding, and Raytheon Systems. "This is extremely high-stakes poker," says Mike Casey, engineering services program manager at Trident. "And the Navy is using unprecedented, nontraditional methods for determining how to build the DD21."
"The Navy came to us to help them manage an extremely large and complex body of design information," Casey says. "The reason we had to use an object-oriented database-management system was because no other storage system offers the kind of sophistication we need to represent all of these kinds of design information. The class structure is huge."
"Our primary use of Jasmine's object-oriented architecture is as an enterprise application repository," says David Britton, director of Trident's technology and development division. "It provides configuration management of the data and the sharing of the data. It shares between engineering cost tools, functional knowledge tools-we use it like a translation mechanism."
Although many object databases are hidden at the core of value-added products or services such as Interchange, some end-user companies are perfectly comfortable cracking the shrink wrap themselves.
CUNA Mutual Group in Madison, Wis., is a financial-services provider for credit unions and their members. To compete with larger financial institutions, CUNA Mutual needed to expand the range of products its credit unions offered their customers. Objectivity Inc.'s Objectivity/DB lets CUNA Mutual manage the large volumes of data required to show the total customer-relationship picture and provide better service and cross-selling capabilities. The company offers a broad range of insurance products, such as property and casualty, plus consumer products such as mutual funds and life insurance.
According to Bob Ferderer, CUNA Mutual's VP of information and technology services, scalability and transaction speed were key issues. "Objectivity gave us the ability to handle millions of complex relationships. I wanted an online database with one-second response time that could query anything in it, and I needed to merge and match individuals with relationships," Ferderer says. "The other important component was that we knew we needed to get into reusable object technology."
In spite of, or perhaps even because of, their advantages, object databases might never gain the same status as relational databases. Anne Thomas, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group, says she doesn't see a huge resurgence in the object-oriented database-management system market. On the other hand, she says, the Web is "definitely driving renewed interest in object-oriented databases." She explains that the language of the Web is objects-Java, XML, or Corba-and these map poorly to a relational database. "That's where an object-oriented database excels. Storing by object is fast," Thomas says. And "fast" is what people want.
Copyright © 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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