B5: Object Oriented Databases

Object oriented databases help represent data as objects in order to give visual aid when classifying different families. These databases use nodes representing the object identity, attributes and methods, relationships, associations, and references. By doing so, one can create an extensible hierarchy of the nodes that were input and how they relate to one another.

The focus of object oriented databases is to manage and store object data by making the language in the program persistent and dominant. The reason for this is to avoid a paradigm shift because you are storing data in the same format that you use it. They may provide a query language, indexing, transaction support with rollback and commit, the possibility of distributing objects transparently over many servers. Some eve come with visual schema designers, integrated development environments, and debuggers. It has a similar programming language to C++ and Java.

An example of how an object oriented database is persistent is if you're downloading an engineering drawing on your computer. In a regular database, your computer would create replicas of each object throughout the entire file and would take time to load up the drawing. With an object oriented database, your computer won't download and create the object from the file until it's needed. Also, when a change is made to an object, the database silently writes the changes to the database so that the version is up to date at all times. This makes opening and changing files much quicker for the user and reduces the amount of error by keeping an updated running version at all times.


Cited Sources:
http://www.odbms.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/035.01-Grossniklaus-ODBMS-Lecture-Introduction-2009.pdf
http://www.odbms.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/003.01-Stevenson-Object-Oriented-Databases-June-2005.pdf

Comments:
Alec- I really liked the first quote you used! Organization tends to be where things fall apart in large construction projects so it is crucial as technology and how we produce progresses, so do our organizational skills.
Tyler- I'm curious about build it yourself databases entail or if it's similar to what I researched with Object Oriented Databases. I'd like to know more about the structure of each types of databases and where they would be most usefully applied