The Design of an ODMG Compatible Parallel Object Database Server

Abstract

The Polar project has the aim of designing a parallel, ODMG compatible object database server. This paper describes the server requirements and investigates issues in designing a system to achieve them. We believe that it is important to build on experience gained in the design and usage of parallel relational database systems over the last ten years, as much is also relevant to parallel object database systems. Therefore we present an overview of the design of parallel relational database servers and investigate how their design choices could be adopted for a parallel object database server. We conclude that while there are many similarities in the requirements and design options for these two types of parallel database servers, there are a number of significant differences, particularly in the areas of object access and method execution.