Database Management System

To combat the limitations of RDBMS and meet the challenge of the increasing rise of the Internet and the Web, programmers developed object-oriented databases in the 1980s. The main objective of Object-Oriented DatabaseManagement Systems, commonly known as OODBMS, is to provide consistent, data independent, secure, controlled and extensible data management services to support the object-oriented model. They were created to handle big and complex data that relational databases could not.

There are important characteristics involved with object-oriented databases. The most important characteristic is the joining of object-oriented programming with database technology, which provides an integrated application developmentsystem. Object-oriented programming results in 4 main characteristics: inheritances, data encapsulation, object identity, and polymorphism. Inheritance allows one to develop solutions to complex problems incrementally by defining new objects in terms of previously defined objects.

Data encapsulation or simply encapsulation allows the hiding of the internal state of the objects. Encapsulated objects are those objects that can only be assessed by their methods instead of their internal states. There are three types of encapsulated objects users and developers should recognize. The first is full encapsulation, in which all the operations on objects are done through message sending and method execution. The second is write encapsulation, which is where the internal state of the object is visible only for reading operations. The third is partial encapsulation, which involves allowing direct access for reading and writing for only a part of the internal state.

Object identity allows objects of the database to be independent of each other. Polymorphism and dynamic binding allow one to define operations for one object and then to share the specification of the operation with other objects. This allows users and/or programmers to compose objects to provide solutions without having to write code that is specific to each object.

The language important to OODBMS is data definition and manipulation language (DDML). The use of this language allows persistent data to be created, updated, deleted, or retrieved. An OODBMS needs a computational versus a relational language because it can be used to avoid impedance mismatch. DDML allows users to define a database, including creating, altering, and dropping tables and establishing constraints. DDMLs are used to maintain and query a database, including updating, inserting, modifying, and querying data.

The OODBMS has many advantages and benefits. First, object-oriented is a more natural way of thinking. Second, the defined operations of these types of systems are not dependent on the particular database application running at a given moment. Third, the data types of object-oriented databases can be extended to support complex data such as images, digital and audio/video, along with other multi-media operations. Different benefits of OODBMS are its reusability, stability, and reliability. Another benefit of OODBMS is that relationships are represented explicitly, often supporting both navigational and associative access to information. This translates to improvement in data access performance versus the relational model.

Another important benefit is that users are allowed to define their own methods of access to data and how it will be represented or manipulated. The most significant benefit of the OODBMS is that these databases have extended into areas not known by the RDBMS. Medicine, multimedia, and high-energy physics are just a few of the new industries relying on object-oriented databases.

As with the relational database method, object-oriented databases also has disadvantages or limitations. One disadvantage of OODBMS is that it lacks a common data model. There is also no current standard, since it is still considered to be in the development stages.