Object Database Management System Research Articles

The Genome Reconstruction Manager: A Software Environment for Supporting High-Throughput DNA Sequencing

A new software system designed for use in high-throughput DNA sequencing laboratories is described. The Genome Reconstruction Manager (GRM) was developed from requirements derived from ongoing large-scale DNA sequencing projects. Object-oriented principles were followed in designing the system, and tools supporting object-oriented system development were employed for its implementation. GRM provides several advances in software support for high-throughput DNA sequencing: support for random, directed, and mixed sequencing strategies; a novel system for fragment assembly; a commercial object data-base management system for data storage; a client/server architecture for using network computational servers; and an underlying data model that can evolve to support fully automatic sequence reconstruction. GRM is currently being deployed for production use in high-throughput DNA sequencing projects.

Maximizing leverage from an object database

With increasing frequency, object database management systems (ODBMSs) are being used as a persistent storage framework for applications. This paper shows that ODBMS frameworks provide a natural repository for supporting object-oriented systems, because they store and manage objects as their atomic units. In addition, these frameworks can offer a great deal of leverage to the developers of applications with the integration of two distinct paradigm shifts: the object-oriented development model, and the direct-reference storage model. Software developers who understand the implications of both paradigm shifts are more likely to use the technology effectively and realize most or all of the potential leverage. Highlighted is ObjectStore™ from Object Design, Inc., which is available as part of the IBM object database solution.

Modeling battlefield sensor environments with an object database management system

The Visual Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Simulation (VIEWS) Workbench software system has been developed by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to enable Army intelligence and electronic warfare (IEW) analysts at Unix workstations to conveniently build detailed IEW battlefield scenarios, or “sensor environments”, to drive the Army's high-resolution IEW sensor performance models. VIEWS is fully object-oriented, including the underlying database.

Transactions and versioning in an ODBMS

Versant Object Technology builds and sells a distributed Object Database Management System (ODBMS), called VERSANT. This position paper proposes transaction model and version model requirements in support of the kinds of distributed database processing that ODBMS applications require. Transaction model requirements address the long transactions required by many ODBMS applications, as well as the short transactions found in conventional DBMS products. Version model requirements suggest a minimal set of primitives which can be extended to support emerging standards and companies' specific models.

Issues in object database management

While the availability of commercial systems from several vendors indicates maturity in object database management technology, there are numerous issues which remain. This panel will attempt to expose and discuss several of these issues. Part of the performance advantage realized by object database management systems comes from linking application programs with the database management system, and the use of large virtual memory caches. This is acceptable in engineering applications where previously large amounts of data were read from the file system into an application program's data space. However, the potential impact on database integrity of giving application programs direct access to very large database management system caches will be of great concern in commercial applications. How can these concerns be addressed with minimal impact on the performance advantage of object database management? There appear to be two distinct approaches to object query languages: extensions to SQL and programming language extensions. SQL extensions might provide a fast path to a standard, but would have the traditional impedance mismatch problems associated with embedded query languages. Language extensions are elegant in that they use the same syntax as the programming language and do not suffer from impedance mismatch problems. However, language extensions would probably make standards more difficult to arrive at as it would require the coordination of extensions to multiple languages. Which of the approaches is most appropriate? In which order should these two approaches be addressed by the object database vendors and standards bodies? One might argue that a good deal of research in relational theory has had little or no impact on commercial relational systems (e.g., relational dependence theory). From a vendor's perspective, what are the hard, interesting research issues whose resolution would allow you to build better systems?